Who they are
Toegepast GezondheidsOnderzoek (TGO) — Applied Health Research — is a research unit within the Gezondheidswetenschappen (Health Sciences) department at Universitair Medisch Centrum Groningen (UMCG), the university hospital of the University of Groningen in the north of the Netherlands. TGO focuses on practice-facing health research, with particular attention to populations and topics that are under-served by conventional academic medicine.
TGO is the academic birthplace of De Sensatie van een Goed Leven (SGL), the four-year participatory action research project that produced sensonate.nl. The project was led from TGO by dr. J.A. Landsman-Dijkstra and dr. Andrea Fokkens, with Marieke Werkman as the project’s doctoral researcher. SGL’s 2018 commissioned literature synthesis is published under the TGO imprint.
Focus areas
- Applied, practice-facing health research
- Participatory action research methodologies, including Adapted Intervention Mapping (AIM)
- Populations at the intersection of disability, neurodivergence, and chronic conditions
- Sensory processing in autism with co-occurring intellectual disability (SGL and its successors)
Relationship to this wiki
TGO is the originating academic institution — without TGO, there would be no SGL, and without SGL, this wiki would not exist. The relationship is historical and foundational. Current ties exist through the retained intellectual property of the SGL project, the 2018 literature synthesis, and Werkman’s peer-reviewed work.
Notable outputs
- van Berckelaer-Onnes, Dijkxhoorn & Hufen 2018 — SGL literature synthesis — the 46-page literature review commissioned by SGL and published under the TGO imprint, ISBN 978-094-034-0855-2
- Werkman 2020 — Cognitive abilities moderate sensory–behavioural links — peer-reviewed study in Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders, vol. 78
- The sensonate.nl platform (launched April 2020, built in collaboration with OQTOO)
- The SGL “What is a Good Life?” conceptual framework (2018)
Key people (public figures only)
- dr. J.A. Landsman-Dijkstra — SGL project lead; TGO senior researcher
- dr. Andrea Fokkens — SGL co-lead; TGO senior researcher
- Marieke Werkman, MSc — SGL doctoral researcher; principal author of the Werkman 2020 paper
Last reviewed
2026-04-12. Relationships and people named above are drawn from public sources (SGL project pages, sensonate.nl, University of Groningen research portal) and should be spot-checked annually — research personnel move, and a doctoral researcher from 2020 may now be elsewhere.