The SPHERE House

The TORUS project will be leveraging and utilising the experience of Bristol’s EPSRC-funded SPHERE IRC (total grant £16M, 2013-2022), with unmatched expertise researching, designing and deploying multi-sensor systems in family homes, including the use of the established SPHERE House in Clifton, Bristol.

The “SPHERE” house is a two-bedroom terrace house, fully-furnished and highly-instrumented to serve as a long-term technology testbed in 2016, still constantly used. Tens of research participants have lived in the house for days or even weeks at a time, in order to help investigate various clinical hypotheses and learn how long-term recorded sensor data can be used to monitor quality of life, well-being and various health conditions. TORUS prototypes will be evaluated for progressively longer periods in the SPHERE house, where patients and families can live with the technologies overnight or for a few days in order to closely mimic the final deployment scenario.

Sensors capture participant’s movements around the house.

While sensors on appliances capture how they are used.