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EMGO+ Institute for Health and Care Research

The EMGO+ Institute for Health and Care Research (EMGO+) is one of the interfaculty research institutes of the VU University Medical Center Amsterdam and the VU University Amsterdam. In EMGO+, researchers from three faculties (the VU University Medical Center, the Faculty of Psychology and Education, and the Department of Health Sciences from the Faculty of Earth and Life Sciences) have joined forces, aiming to further improve public and occupational health, primary care, rehabilitation and long-term care, by means of multi and interdisciplinary research.

The activities of EMGO+ predominantly deal with research in primary care and public health, focusing on chronic diseases and ageing. It concerns multidisciplinary applied research with a strong emphasis on health outcomes relevant to individuals in the extramural setting. The research projects are grouped in four consistent programmes: Lifestyle, Overweight and Diabetes, Mental Health, Quality of Care, and Musculoskeletal Health. EMGO+'s dual aim is to excel on criteria for scientific quality as well as on criteria for societal relevance.

Behavioural Informatics group

The Behavioural Informatics group investigates methods and techniques for modelling and analysis of agent systems in the area of human-oriented Ambient Intelligence (or Human Ambience). In this area agent systems are considered from two perspectives. On the one hand, to obtain distributed software/hardware systems, the agent systems perspective provides concepts used in design and implementation of practically applied software/hardware agent systems. On the other hand, agent systems provide a conceptual framework to model, analyse and simulate parts of reality studied in the context of other scientific disciplines such as Biology, Neurology, Psychology, and Social Sciences. Both fundamental and application-directed aspects (and their interaction) of agent systems are investigated.