Psychodigital Research

Biopsychosocial stress, digital health, and the social psychology of AI in clinical practice and daily life.

The Wekenborg Lab is an interdisciplinary research group at the intersection of medical psychology, biopsychological stress research, and digital health. We connect biological mechanisms (parasympathetic regulation, endocrine reactivity, and inflammatory dynamics) with psychological experience and social context.

Our work investigates how stress, recovery, and change unfold across psychological pathologies, and how digital technologies and generative AI reshape clinical interaction, well-being, and therapeutic processes. We treat AI not only as a methodological tool, but as an independent subject of psychological inquiry: a social and interactive actor with its own behavioural signatures.

A central empirical foundation is the Dresden Burnout Study, initiated in 2015 and led by us since 2025. It is the world's largest biopsychosocial longitudinal cohort on stress-induced exhaustion. Our portfolio is complemented by ambulatory assessment studies in clinical environments and large-scale behavioural experiments with large language models.

We are part of the EKFZ for Digital Health at the Faculty of Medicine, TUD Dresden University of Technology, in Dresden, Germany.

Wekenborg Lab group photo, 2025
Wekenborg Lab, 2025 · EKFZ Center for Digital Health, Dresden.

IResearch Focus

Biopsychosocial Stress Mechanisms
Parasympathetic regulation, endocrine dynamics, and inflammatory processes as regulators of stress and recovery in psychological and psychosomatic disorders, with the goal of identifying predictive biomarker signatures for personalised therapy and prevention.
Burnout & Exhaustion Across Disorders
Longitudinal biopsychosocial cohorts on stress-induced and virus-induced exhaustion, including the Dresden Burnout Study and a DFG-funded post-COVID cohort, to map symptom dynamics across mental and somatic conditions.
Digital Health & Clinician Well-being
Multimodal ambulatory assessment of how electronic health records, patient portals, and AI-based clinical tools shape momentary affect, stress, and psychophysiology in clinicians and patients.
Social Psychology of AI Agents
Large-scale behavioural experiments characterising the social signatures of large language models, using classical paradigms from social and personality psychology, to understand human–AI interaction.
LLMs in Clinical Psychology
Using language models as experimental systems in human psychopathology, probing how generative AI can model, simulate, and inform our understanding of psychological mechanisms.
Visual Exposome & Daily Life
Coupling ecological momentary assessment with vision-language models to quantify the first-person visual environment and its associations with affect, chronic stress, and well-being.

IICurrent Studies

Ongoing prospective studies led by the lab.

Dresden Burnout Study

since 2015 · lead since 2025

The world's largest biopsychosocial longitudinal cohort on stress-induced exhaustion. It is the empirical backbone for our work on parasympathetic, endocrine, and inflammatory markers of recovery.

CovEx: Cardiac Vagal Regulation in Post-COVID Exhaustion

DFG · with Heidelberg

A 72-hour ambulatory assessment cohort combining continuous ECG-derived HRV with smartphone-based momentary assessment, examining how cardiac vagal activity couples to daily stress and multidimensional exhaustion after SARS-CoV-2 infection. With Prof. Dr. Uta Merle, University Hospital Heidelberg.

Portal-Eva

UKD · patient-portal evaluation

Prospective evaluation of a new patient portal at Universitätsklinikum Carl Gustav Carus Dresden, analysing acceptance, user experience, and psychophysiological correlates of digital adoption in clinical staff.

PREDICT-USE-TDS

Tumor documentation

Investigating the predictive power and temporal dynamics of immediate vs. delayed user evaluations for forecasting outcomes in tumor documentation systems, bridging UX research and clinical informatics.

CareTech

AI telephone assistance · nursing

Psychophysiological monitoring of stress responses in everyday nursing care and accompanying evaluation of AI-based telephone-assistance and patient-portal interventions.

IIISelected Publications

A selection of recent first- and last-author work. For a full list of 50+ peer-reviewed publications, please visit ORCID.

Large language models as experimental systems in human psychopathology: a modelling study. Wekenborg MK, Michels EAM, Kurze G, Kropp ML, Wolf F, Harzbecker J, Wiest IC, Kather JN. The Lancet Digital Health, 2026.
The social psychology of artificial intelligence agents. Wekenborg MK, Harzbecker J, Husak O, et al., Kather JN. Preprint, 2026.
EHR perception predicts momentary well-being in oncology professionals. Wekenborg MK, Rominger C, Michels EAM, Wiest IC, Treiber L, Eder J, Schwerdtfeger AR, Kather JN. Preprint, 2026.
Quantifying the human visual exposome with vision–language models. Rominger C, Schwerdtfeger AR, Singh MG, Khudyakow D, Michels EAM, Wolf F, Kather JN*, Wekenborg MK*. Preprint, 2026. *equal contribution.
Cardiac vagal regulation as a predictor of momentary exhaustion in Post-COVID-19: understanding daily symptom dynamics. Wekenborg MK, et al. Manuscript under review, 2026.

IVFunding

More than €2 million in third-party research funding to date. We are grateful to our funders and partners:

DFG · CovEx
Cardiac vagal regulation in post-COVID exhaustion (with Heidelberg).
DFG · VAGEX 2.0
Vagal exhaustion dynamics. Mechanism-oriented stress research.
Carl-Zeiss-Stiftung · Multi-dimensionAI
Linking scales of information to improve care for patients with heart failure.
Mercedes-Benz-Stiftung · Forum Forschung
Interdisciplinary research forum on biopsychosocial dimensions of work and health.
FoGa · DigitalCare
Digital interventions in care work: evaluation and psychophysiological monitoring.
BMFTR & BAuA
Federal projects on workplace stress, occupational health, and digital work environments.

VPress & Media

Selected interviews and coverage on stress research, burnout, and digitalisation in healthcare.

VIPrincipal Investigator

PD Dr. Magdalena K. Wekenborg

PD Dr. rer. nat. habil. Magdalena K. Wekenborg

Research Group Leader, Psychodigital Research

  • TU Dresden (EKFZ)
  • University Hospital Carl Gustav Carus
  • Dresden Burnout Study

Magdalena Wekenborg is a biopsychologist working at the interface of medical psychology, stress research, and digital health. Since 2024 she has led the Psychodigital Research group at the EKFZ for Digital Health at the TU Dresden Faculty of Medicine.

For more than a decade her research has focused on biopsychosocial stress mechanisms, in particular parasympathetic regulation, endocrine processes, and inflammatory dynamics, and how these biological systems relate to the success and sustainability of psychological and psychopharmacological interventions.

She views digital innovation, and generative AI in particular, both as a methodological foundation for studying complex biopsychosocial processes and as an independent subject of medical psychology, with implications for clinical interaction, decision-making, and patient and clinician well-being.

Academic Path

  • 2025: Habilitation, TU Dresden
  • Since 2024: Group Leader, EKFZ, TU Dresden
  • 2019: PhD (Dr. rer. nat.), TU Dresden
  • Master: Clinical Psychology, FSU Jena
  • Bachelor: Psychology, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg

Recognition & Engagement

  • Dr.-Walter-Seipp-Preis (Commerzbank-Stiftung) for dissertation
  • 50+ peer-reviewed publications
  • 20+ first- or last-author publications
  • Member, Open Science Initiative TU Dresden
  • 10+ years of teaching at psychological and medical faculties

Join Us

We welcome inquiries from prospective doctoral students, postdocs, visiting researchers, and collaborators with a background in biopsychology, clinical psychology, digital health, or AI.

If your work touches on stress, exhaustion, ambulatory assessment, human–AI interaction, or clinical informatics, we want to hear from you.

Get in touch