PhD Scholarships Network PIPIN: Promoting independence through personalised interactive technologies

The University of Sheffield is funding an interdisciplinary scholarships network which is concerned with how 21st century computing can be harnessed to improve the lives of older and disabled people. Three studentships are available spanning health research, engineering, computer science and sociology and there will be significant opportunities for cross discipline working.

The following core themes will underpin network activities:

• A focus upon assistive technologies; that is devices that are designed to enable older and people with disabilities to retain independence, in some instances with assistance from health and social care services.
• Device construction and testing that is informed by the needs and wants of the end user.
• The capacity to personalise the technology to meet the individual needs of specific users.

Award details

A network of three PhD scholarships is being funded by the University for 3 years, providing each student with a stipend at the standard Research Council rate (£13,590 in 2011-12), UK/EU fees and a research training grant of £1,000 p.a. Each studentship will be supervised jointly by two departments:

Project 1: Electrical and Electronic Engineering and the School of Health and Related Research,
Project 2: Computer Science and Human Communication Sciences,
Project 3: Sociology and the School of Health and Related Research.

Eligibility

• Academic requirements – applicants should have, or expect to achieve, a first or upper second class UK honours degree or equivalent qualifications gained outside the UK in an appropriate area of study.
• Allowed study options – applicants should be registering on their first year of study with the University for 2011-12 on one of the selected PhD projects listed below.
• Residency restrictions – awards are open to UK, EU and international applicants. International applicants will be required to prove that they have sufficient funds to cover the difference between the UK/EU and Overseas tuition fees.

Project 1: Adaptive Lifestyle Monitoring

Supervisors: Dr Charith Abhayaratne, Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, (c.abhayaratne@sheffield.ac.uk); Dr Fabien Cardinaux, School of Health And Related Research (fabien.cardinaux@sheffield.ac.uk).

This project will address the technological challenges involved in the creation and application of user centred personalised adaptive lifestyle monitoring which is the long term, continuous collection and analysis of a person’s day to day activity levels and related environmental parameters within their home. The main goal is to research and develop technology for an automated personal advisor based on the concept of lifestyle monitoring for older and disabled people. The advisor will monitor the user (person receiving the lifestyle monitoring service) and adapt its functionality according to the user’s behaviour, alerting them and/or their family carer if behaviour falls outside normal parameters. Such monitoring systems usually look for events or conditions that may indicate cause for concern, leading to prompts for the user and/or their family carers. The study will use both conventional sensors and emerging video sensors and build a multi-modal monitoring system based on machine learning techniques that will learn and continuously adapt to a particular user. The study will give more focus on the use of video sensors for lifestyle monitoring. The methods will include visual and other feature extraction, multimodal feature fusion and machine learning concepts for continuously learning and updating the user profile. This project will involve continuous interaction with project 3 to gain insight into user requirements and acceptability of the technology for the user at various stages of the project.

The successful candidate should have, or expect to achieve, a first or upper second class UK honours degree in Electronic and Electrical Engineering or Computer Science or a related field. He or she must have excellent programming skills in C++. The student will be based in the department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering (EEE) and will be jointly supervised by School of Health and Related Research. He or she will be engaged in interdisciplinary research within PIPIN network.

Project 2: Interaction with PALS - Personal Adaptive Listening Systems

Supervisors: Professor Phil Green, Department of Computer Science (pdg@sheffield.ac.uk); Professor Bill Wells, Department of Human Communication Sciences (bill.wells@sheffield.ac.uk).

PIPIN is closely associated with a major EPSRC programme grant in Natural Speech Technology (NST, www.natural-speech-technology.org/), in which we collaborate with the Universities of Edinburgh and Cambridge. Within NST Sheffield leads the homeService project, which will build the first generation of Personal Adaptive Listeners (PALs). A PAL is a portable, perhaps wearable, device that belongs to an individual and adapts to the speech communication characteristics and preferences of its owner. Like human listeners, it does this whilst in use, does it quickly and extends its utility over time. A PAL is somewhat akin to a human valet: it understands the owner’s needs, carries out their wishes and sometimes acts on their behalf. The technology adapts to its user, rather than the other way round. In homeService we are trying to help people who have difficulties in using conventional interfaces: because they are disabled, or have speech disorders, or simply dislike computers, keyboards and screens. For these clients, the PAL will provide control of assistive technology and connection to the digital world (shopping, banking, booking..) by voice. The relationship between owner and PAL should develop over a long period, and homeService is based around a 3-year longitudinal study, During this time the PAL will improve its accuracy and its range of capabilities as it learns more about its owner’s voice and use of language.

This studentship will focus on the dialogues between a PAL and its owner. These dialogues may be spoken: the PAL will have a personalised voice generated by new speech synthesis techniques being developed within NST (Edinburgh lead this theme). Initially the dialogues will be simple and formulaic, restricted to issuing and confirming commands and perhaps correcting errors. As the PAL expands its capabilities, the dialogues should become richer and their content and style should adapt to the owner’s preferences, just as having a conversation with someone you know well is quite different from communicating with a stranger.

Spoken dialogue systems have been researched for some time but the idea of personalising them is new. Anyone who has used telephone-based systems which deploy speech technology (for instance to book cinema tickets) will appreciate how unnatural and tedious current dialogue systems can be. Speaking with a PAL has several interesting aspects: the growth in the interaction with time, the opportunities for personalisation and, perhaps most importantly, the idea that the owner should be able to explicitly teach the PAL : ‘these are the names of my friends, this is what I’ll say when you’ve made a mistake..’ The owner-PAL relationship we are trying to establish through dialogue is somewhat akin to training a dog, or teaching a young child, making this project a challenge for linguists interested in Human Speech Communication as well as researchers in speech technology .

The successful candidate must be able to work across traditional boundaries, as the PALs project offers challenges in Phonetics, Linguistics and Computer Science. We are seeking to recruit someone with a background in one of these fields and some knowledge of the others. e.g. a computer science graduate who is interested in learning about conversation analysis and phonetics or a linguistics/speech sciences graduate who has some experience of computer programming and is interested in learning about speech technology. As the project will involve working with homeService clients, user-facing skills are also important. The student will be based jointly in the Departments of Computer Science and Human Communication Sciences.

Project 3: What makes an assistive technology in the home invaluable or alternatively abandoned?

Supervisors: Dr Bridgette Wessels, Department of Sociology (b.wessels@sheffield.ac.uk), Professor Gail Mountain, School of Health And Related Research (g.a.mountain@sheffield.ac.uk)

This project will address the ways in which assistive technologies are introduced, learnt and accepted by users in their homes and everyday lives. There is little knowledge about the way in which assistive technologies are taken up in domestic everyday life by users with health and social care needs and little known about the value of personalisation of assistive technology. The study will involve research with the network’s user group to explore how people learn to personalise their assistive technologies in the context of their everyday lives. The study will address: the spaces in the home in which the technology needs to be fitted into existing structures and furnishings; the social relations of the older person or disabled person – i.e. who supports them, and in what way, who are the informal as well as formal carers and how do these people interact and structure their support; the specific daily routines of health care, which includes considering how people cope with new technologies and routines, and the details of how people learn to personalise their assistive technology. The methodological approach will be qualitative and will use observation and interview methods. Methods will include observation in the home of everyday routines, observation of the introduction of assistive technologies and the process of take up, appropriation, or rejection within the social relations of the household and care support system. Observation will also be undertaken of the way in which people learn to personalise their technology including details of learning processes. Interviews will be conducted with users, family carers and professional health care workers to explore the experiences of learning and using assistive technologies. The student will be fully integrated into the activities of the PIPIN network and will have opportunities for full career development. He or she will learn to engage with user communities, professional health care workers and industry. He or she will also learn to conduct research in an interdisciplinary way and will gain benefit from these developments in methodology, which are becoming increasingly relevant to research.

The successful candidate should have, or expect to achieve, a first or upper second class UK honours social science degree or equivalent qualifications gained outside the UK in an appropriate area of study. The student should have knowledge of sociological issues in health and social care and in telecare. He or she should be interested in developing qualitative methodology in an interdisciplinary environment.

How to apply

Applicants are advised to contact the project supervisors as above to discuss their application in the first instance. Applicants should then apply for admission to the University online via the University website (http://www.shef.ac.uk/postgraduate/online.html) and then complete a short form specific to this network which is available at:
www.shef.ac.uk/postgraduate/research/scholarships/pipinapplication

Applicants may also be asked to attend an interview to assess their suitability for the project.

Closing date Friday 24th June, 2011.