Ralph Michels is the founder and CEO of Eyedog, a company specializing in wayfinding support for patients in complex hospital environments. He holds an MSc in Civil Engineering, with a specialization in Spatial Information Systems.
For almost 15 years, Ralph has worked with healthcare organizations in Europe, the United States, and Australia on a deceptively simple challenge: how can we best help patients find their way through large and complex hospitals?
Alongside his work at Eyedog, Ralph is a PhD researcher at the Section of Transport and Planning at Delft University of Technology. His research focuses on how patients can best be supported in finding their way through hospitals, taking into account their emotional state and the cognitive demands of navigation.
Rather than approaching wayfinding primarily as a visual design problem, his research looks at it as an information design problem: what information should be presented, at what moment, at what location, to which patient, and through which touchpoint?