PhD studentship - Adapted Home Environments for People with Dementia

Dementia affects 750.000 people in UK and this number is expected to reach a million by 2021. Dementia patients value their freedom being at home; and living costs in care homes are excessively high for both public and personal finances. Thus, a strategy to ensure independent life and reduce the costs is to support people with dementia in completing their daily tasks themselves at home using assistive technologies.

This project will develop a unified monitoring framework that includes three main functionalities: warning, reminding and real-time monitoring of the home environment for assisting people with dementia. In particular the project will focus on designing new computational algorithms capable of reasoning about the person’s activities and profile (describes his/her habits, medication, etc.) in order to make intelligent decisions. The target system will assist the person by either taking actions on his/her behalf, remind him about actions to be taken and/or warn himself and his relatives in case of emergency. The target system will be developed in close collaboration with BUDI institute at all stages in order to make it as suitable and effective as possible; thus dementia patients will continuously test the system’s new functionalities.

Eligibility Criteria Candidates for this fully-funded PhD studentship must demonstrate outstanding qualities and be motivated to complete a PhD in 3 years. All candidates must satisfy the University’s minimum doctoral entry criteria for studentships of an honours degree at Upper Second Class (2.1) and/or an appropriate Masters degree. An IELTS (Academic) score of 6.5 minimum is essential for candidates for whom English is not their first language.

In addition to satisfying basic entry criteria, BU will look closely at the qualities, skills and background of each candidate and what they can bring to their chosen research project.

To discuss this opportunity further please contact Dr. Abdelhamid Bouchachia,  abouchachia@bournemouth.ac.uk

For details on how to apply please visit www.bournemouth.ac.uk/phd2013

Closing Date The first call for applications will close on 1^st June 2013.