Principal Investigator and Director

Professor Ian Craddock

Professor Ian Craddock

Ian Craddock is the Head of School for the School of Faculty of Civil, Aerospace and Design Engineering and School of Engineering Mathematics and Technology professor at the University of Bristol. He is also the Director of the EPSRC CDT in Digital Health and Care and the Director on LEAP (Leadership Engagement Acceleration & Partnership) – an EPSRC Digital Health Hub. Additionally, he is the Head of the Digital Health Engineering Research Group. Previously, he was the Director of the EPSRC funded SPHERE IRC (£12M, ~30 postdocs and 10 PhD students). His interests are pervasive healthcare, technology for self-management of long term health conditions, data fusion and clinical decision support.

Co-Director

Professor Lynn Rochester

Professor Lynn Rochester

Lynn Rochester is the Senior Investigator at NIHR, Digital Health Co-Lead at Newcastle NIHR BRC, IMI Mobilise D-Consortium Coordinator and Director at Brain and Movement Research Group. Her research aims to deliver solutions for relevant, inclusive and resilient health improvements in ageing and multiple long term conditions.

Co-Investigators

Professor Paul Watson

Professor Paul Watson

Paul Watson FREng FBCS CEng is Director of the UK’s National Innovation Centre for Data and Professor of Computer Science at Newcastle University. He began his career at Manchester University before moving to industry to design parallel database servers based. In 1995 he joined Newcastle University where his research and teaching has focussed on scalable data engineering. Professor Watson is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the British Computer Society, and a Chartered Engineer. He received the 2014 Microsoft Jim Gray eScience Award.

Professor Majid Mirmehdi

Professor Majid Mirmehdi

Majid Mirmehdi is a Professor of Computer Vision in the School of Computer Science. His research interests include natural scene analysis for monitoring and understanding the behaviour of humans and animals, and medical imaging. He has more than 250 refereed conference and journal publications in these and other areas of computer vision. Professor Mirmehdi is a Fellow of the International Association for Pattern Recognition and a Distinguished Fellow of the British Machine Vision Association. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal of IET Computer Vision.

Dr George Oikonomou

Dr George Oikonomou

George Oikonomou is an Associate Professor of IoT Networking, with 7 years of post-doctoral research experience in the UK (University of Bristol and Loughborough University). Education Director, School of Electrical, Electronic and Mechanical Engineering. Originally a statistician, with an MSc in Information Systems and a PhD in Computer Networking, both from the Department of Informatics at the Athens University of Economics and Business. Co-founder, steering group member and maintainer of Contiki-NG, the next generation, open source operating system for the IoT. 

Professor Abi Durrant

Professor Abi Durrant

Abi Durrant is a Professor of Interaction Design and Co-Director of Open Lab and EPSRC Centre for Digital Citizens at Newcastle University, predominantly working in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). She is also Co-Director of Open Lab’s Doctoral Training Centre in Digital Civics. Her research addresses the significant design challenges that we face for managing identity in our everyday interactions with digital technologies and personal data. She is the Principal Investigator for the EPSRC-funded project INTUIT: Interaction Design for Trusted Sharing of Personal Health Data to Live Well with HIV.

Dr Aisling O'Kane

Dr Aisling O'Kane

Aisling O’Kane is the Associate Professor of Human-Computer Interaction for Health at the University of Bristol. Her research focuses on understanding how health and wellbeing technologies are used in the wild. She employs qualitative and participatory design approaches to studies of interactive technologies such as fitness apps, medical devices, and wearable technologies. Past and current studies include the examination of the use of Type 1 Diabetes devices, mobile phone apps for running, wearables in the gym, hearing aids, and high tech wearable baby monitors. 

Dr Silvia Del Din

Dr Silvia Del Din

Silvia Del Din has been working in the Newcastle University’s Brain and Movement (BAM) Research Group since 2012, where she has been contributing to build the digital health theme. Her translational research focus is enhancing the use of wearable technology and developing novel analytics to support remote monitoring and clinical management in ageing and age-related diseases (e.g., Parkinson’s). She is currently PI and involved as Co-I with leadership roles in various clinical trials and digital health projects including Mobilise-D, IDEA-FAST, Deep & Frequent Phenotyping and Exenatide.

Dr Cathy Morgan

Dr Cathy Morgan

Catherine Morgan is a Neurology Specialty Registrar who has an interest in movement disorders and Parkinson’s disease in particular. Her PhD thesis, which is pending submission, details her research work exploring the acceptability and holistic experience of a multimodal sensor platform in a home setting for people living with Parkinson’s. She has also investigated specific parameters which can be extracted from free-living that show promise in measurement of Parkinson’s symptoms for use in clinical trials.

Professor Kenton O'Hara

Professor Kenton O'Hara

Kenton O’Hara is a Professor of Human-Computer Interaction in the School of Computer Science.  He has over 30 years of research and innovation experience developing human-centred research agendas and multidisciplinary teams in world renowned research organisations including Microsoft Research, Xerox EuroPARC, Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Commonwealth Scientific Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) and the Appliance Studio. An experienced leader of multi-disciplinary teams with proven success translating research concept to product. His research combines computing and social sciences and spans Human-Computer Interaction, Artificial Intelligence, Digital Health, Hybrid Work Futures and Ubiquitous Computing. 

Dr Alan Whone

Dr Alan Whone

Alan Whone leads a programme of research in Parkinson’s disease and other movement disorders at the Bristol Brain Centre, Southmead Hospital. Since 2010 Alan has been Principal Applicant or Co-applicant on £5-million of peer reviewed grant funding (Parkinson’s UK, NIHR) and £1 million of industry or local charities research funding. Alan collaborates in studies led by Drs Coulthard and Grogan to understand cognitive changes in Parkinson’s and the role of dopamine in the formation of memory. Alan is Neurology lead for NBT – one of the largest providers of Deep Brain Stimulation Surgery for Movement Disorders in the UK, and integrated with this service is a programme of DBS research that involves both novel stimulation devices and novel targets for stimulation.

Professor Alison Yarnall

Professor Alison Yarnall

Alison Yarnall is a Professor of Geriatric Medicine at the Translational and Clinical Research Institute, Newcastle University; Deputy Director of the Clinical Ageing Research Unit; Honorary Consultant in Older People’s Medicine at Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust; and DeNDRON Subspecialty Clinical Research Lead for Parkinson’s disease in the North East of England. She has a particular interest in mobility (including digital mobility), cognition, gait and falls in people with Parkinson’s and other neurodegenerative diseases.  She runs a specialist clinic for older adults with Parkinson’s and complex health needs, in addition to a general medical memory clinic.

Dr Zahraa Abdallah

Dr Zahraa Abdallah

Zahraa Abdallah is a Senior Lecturer in Machine Learning at the School of Engineering Mathematics and Technology. Her primary research focus revolves around temporal data and multi-modality, with a special focus on healthcare applications. Zahraa is actively involved in a range of multidisciplinary projects including the exploration of biomarkers for early-stage detection of Alzheimer’s disease, early cancer detection methods, analysis of EEG data for insights into Parkinson’s disease, and unveiling clinically unknown patterns in insulin needs for diabetic patients.

Professor David Kirk

Professor David Kirk

Dave Kirk is Professor of Human-Computer Interaction and Co-Director of Open Lab in the School of Computer Science, Newcastle University, where he also leads the EPSRC Next Stage Digital Economy Centre for Digital Citizens. He has a background in psychology, ergonomics and human-centred design.

Professor Raul Santos-Rodriguez

Professor Raul Santos-Rodriguez

Raul Santos-Rodriguez is a Turing AI Fellow and Professor in Data Science and AI at the University of Bristol. His research interests lie around the study of the foundations of machine learning and the way machine learning systems and humans interact and collaborate in different healthcare domains.

Dr James Pope

Dr James Pope

James Pope is a Lecturer in Data Science in the School of Engineering Mathematics and Technology at the University of Bristol. He previously worked on the EurValve and SYNERGIA projects.  His research interests include embedded AI/ML and graph neural networks for healthcare and cybersecurity applications.

Dr Telmo de Menezes e Silva Filho

Dr Telmo de Menezes e Silva Filho

Telmo Silva Filho is a Senior Lecturer in Data Science with research interests in evaluation and explainability of machine learning models, medical applications of computer vision, latent-variable models, and reinforcement learning.

Researchers

Dr Em Tonkin

Dr Em Tonkin

Em Tonkin is a Research Fellow working with Digital Health. Much of her work relates to law, ethics and best practice in data management and processing of healthcare-related data. Her research focuses include fault-tolerance, observability and auditability in domestic digital health deployments, robust architectures for digital health systems, and interdisciplinary applications of data analysis, machine learning and visualisation.

Dr Lenia Margariti

Dr Lenia Margariti

Lenia (Eleni) Margariti is a Postdoctoral Researcher in TORUS project, based at Open Lab, Newcastle University, UK. Her focus is on Human-Building-Interaction research, Design research and Mixed-methods research in the context of wellbeing in the built environment. Her past works include designing & deploying awareness technologies for climatic data in smart buildings, exploring the experiences of the building occupants utilizing embedded and wearable sensors, and co-design activities with a focus on workplace wellbeing and data use in the built environment.

Shuhao (Duke) Dong

Shuhao (Duke) Dong

Duke Dong is a Research Associate in Wearable Technologies for Digital Health. In his PhD at the University of Leeds he mainly focused on hand-held haptic devices for upper limb rehabilitation after stroke. His research interests include haptic feedback, embedded system design and movement analysis based on kinematic data. His current work designs a wearable sensor to collect mobility-related features for Parkinson’s patients

Dr Jingjing Liu

Dr Jingjing Liu

Jingjing Liu completed her Master and Ph.D. (2017-2023) in Mechanical Engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China (with Prof. Honghai Liu), where she focused on the multimodal human behaviour analysis and applications on autism screening. Currently she is a Research Associate in the School of Computer Science, University of Bristol (with Prof. Majid Mirmehdi), with the aim of human pose estimation in home environments regarding Parkinson’s patients.

Dr Kirsty Scott

Dr Kirsty Scott

Kirsty Scott is currently a Research Associate with the Brain and Movement (BAM) research group at Newcastle University. Her research interest focuses on the assessing the technical validity of wearable sensors in estimating real-world walking. Leveraging my previous clinical work, she is also interested in the acceptability and usability of digital devices in healthcare through patient and public involvement (PPI).

Dr Lisa Alcock

Dr Lisa Alcock

After obtaining her PhD in Musculoskeletal Biomechanics in 2012, Lisa Alcock joined Newcastle University where she is currently working as a Senior Research Associate, and leads the Human Movement Laboratory at the Clinical Ageing Research Unit. She has published widely in the field of clinical biomechanics, movement science and neuroscience (>100 publications) and secured significant research and capital investment funding.

Elaine Czech

Elaine Czech

Elaine Czech is a Design Researcher in the Human-Computer Interaction field. She has a BFA in Art and Design from the University of Michigan and an MA in Media Design from Keio University. Her PhD focused on design technologies to improve accessibility of community spaces for members of the dementia community.

Dr Amirhossein Dadashzadeh

Dr Amirhossein Dadashzadeh

Amirhossein (Amir) Dadashzadeh is a Research Associate in Computer Vision, having recently completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Bristol. His focus is on developing innovative algorithms for monitoring Parkinson’s patients, utilising advanced methods to analyse human actions in video data.

Dr Guanxiong Sun

Dr Guanxiong Sun

Guanxiong Sun specialises in computer vision, particularly in video analysis. His PhD research focuses on tasks such as video object detection, video instance segmentation, and tracking. His research interests are in multimodal representation learning and advancing video language models. Guanxiong is driven by a deep passion for projects that can generate real-world impacts.

Dr Chloe Hinchliffe

Dr Chloe Hinchliffe

Chloe Hinchliffe is a Research Associate in the Translational and Clinical Research Institute and is a part of the Brain and Movement research group. Her background is in biomedical engineering and in her PhD she explored seizure classification from EEG and ECG recordings with machine and deep learning. At Newcastle, she is predominantly working on the IDEA-FAST project, as well as Mobilise-D and BRC Tools. She will be joining the project in late 2024.

Project Staff

Mae Hazell

Mae Hazell

Mae Hazell has a Master’s in Molecular Neuroscience and experience of managing multiple projects at the University of Bristol and in the NHS. She has over 4 years’ experience working in clinical trials in a variety of fields, including cardiac surgery, ophthalmology and COVID-19 vaccine studies.

Summer Paliunyte

Summer Paliunyte

Summer Paliunyte has experience of working in a wide range of TV projects – for the BBC’s NHU, National Geographic, Channel 4, ITV and ITN – and has recently brought it to the University of Bristol. Previously she worked as the Lead Department Representative, Ambassador and Technical PAL at the University of the West of England. 

Ann Gibson

Ann Gibson

Ann Gibson has worked at Newcastle University for 6 years and provides administrative support for TORUS, Mobilise-D and the BRC Digital Health, Ageing Innovation and Inclusion theme projects . She also provides support to the Brain and Movement research group.

Louise Duncan

Louise Duncan

Louise Duncan is the Senior Engagement Officer for TORUS, responsible for the Patient Council and building engagement with key stakeholders such as local community organisations, charities and patient groups. Louise joined the University of Bristol in 2016 and has over 13 years experience in Higher Education across a variety of roles including student engagement, student support and outreach.