Tomorrow's Home online conversation archive

Nanoengineering – engineering at a teeny tiny scale – has a lot of benefits for sustainable healthcare technology. Manish will talk about how nanoengineering can create surfaces or paints that make it difficult for bacteria and viruses to survive. He'll also discuss self-cleaning surfaces which could reduce the need for environmentally-harmful detergents, and conserve water and energy use. 

Manish is a Royal Society Wolfson Fellow and Professor of Nanoengineering in UCL. He leads a platform in UCL’s Wellcome/EPSRC Centre for Interventional and Surgical Science.

Angelo is Head of Product Development at MAS Health, a Sri Lankan-based company that develops 'next-to-skin' solutions that enhance people's quality of life. He'll talk about the work they do at MAS Health and how design, wearable technology, textiles and health can come together in harmony.

Architect Richard will discuss his work which flips the idea that germs in our homes are bad for us on its head. Richard's work acknowledges the important role that germs or microbes play in healthy bodies and healthy environments. His work includes encouraging beneficial bacteria to grow, and restoring environmental microbes which are missing from our cities. 

Richard is an architect and Associate Professor of Bioaugmented Design at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. 

Ivana will talk about her work developing ETHERA, a real-time patient monitoring platform that bridges the gap between home life and in-patient care. ETHERA captures health information via wearable sensors and mobile apps and usings AI to analyse the data and alert healthcare professionals to any problems. It's been designed in collaboration with patients and clinicians to empower patients to take charge of their health!

Ivana is an Associate Professor in the UCL Department of Computer Science.

The title of this talk refers to the practice of blurring backgrounds on video calls, which is common when we participate remotely in health, education, work and other social activities.  The talk draws on emerging findings from two qualitative research studies:  the use of video consultations for healthcare during the pandemic and a study, Virtual Presence, of telepresence technologies in the home. You'll learn more about how private and public spheres of life appear to shift and change as people participate in these activities, and reflect on our assumptions about homes. 

Gemma is an interdisciplinary health services researcher in the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Services at the University of Oxford. 

In recent years, scientists and doctors have been eagerly exploring the possibilities of using robots in surgery and rehabilitation. Rui will talk about new ways that robots and games are being used for clinical training, and how they can have a positive impact on mental and physical recovery. 

Rui is Head of the UCL Institute of Orthopaedics and Musculoskeletal Science and also leads the Aspire Centre for Rehabilitation Engineering and Assistive Technology (CREATe) at UCL.

We have designed and embedded into over 20 NHS long covid clinics, a digital chronic disease management platform to connect long covid patients with their clinicians. The digital platform consists of two parts, a patient-facing mobile phone App and a clinician facing dashboard accessed through any web browser. This platform is then integrated into different long covid clinics to allow remote triage, assessment and monitoring of patients.

Henry is an NIHR Clinical Lecturer in Primary Care and Digital Health and also works 2 days a week as a GP. Learn more about the Living with Long Covid project.

Creepiness is a product of ambiguity, evoking both revulsion and fascination and leaving us paralysed in a state of hyper-vigilance. The idealised image of the home is far from this: a comforting sanctuary, opaque to the prying eyes of others and distinctly private. Domestic technologies offer us brilliantly useful services, enhancing our wellbeing by supporting our memory, automating repetitive tasks, and monitoring the security status of our homes. In return, these technologies often gain privileged access to our behaviour, relationships, identities, and health status. Why does this make us uncomfortable, and what can we do about it?

Ava is a PhD candidate in cognitive neuroscience at UCL

In recent years, there's been a rise in online harassment and sexual abuse carried out through digital devices. 'Tech abuse' can range from cyberstalking through to behavioural control. Internet-enabled devices like smart meters, locks and cameras considerably increase the risk of abuse. Leonie will talk about her research project, 'Gender and the IoT (Internet of Things)' – looking at how smart technologies impact domestic and sexual violence, and how we can combat this abuse. 

Leonie Tanczer is a Lecturer in International Security and Emerging Technologies at UCL. 

A smartphone isn't really a phone, nor is it smart, states Danny Miller. Instead, it's another place where we live - what Danny refers to as a 'transportal home'. This has profound implications for our well-being and the way we live our lives, but of course this varies across different populations.

Danny is a Professor of Anthropology at UCL. He is a co-author of The Global Smartphone, which closely relates to this talk. You can download The Global Smartphone for free from the UCL Press website.  

"Thank you NHS". Signs hand-painted on windows, cars and giant murals during the early months of the pandemic showed just how much our National Health Service means to us all. Yet a year later, millions of people deliberately opted-out of sharing their medical information with public health scientists. This talk will discuss the great pandemic data disconnect and how scientists and engineers might re-engage with everyone to build tomorrow's homes that connect what matters most.  

Cian O'Donovan is a Senior Research Fellow at UCL's Department of Science and Technology Studies
For brand new research on public trust and health data, see here.
For our work on data-use during the pandemic see here. 
Twitter: @cian

We often come across a new way to personalise gifts, decoration, furniture as we prefer but would it be also possible to tailor the medicine to the individual? Would it be possible to personalise devices to monitor our health at home? Emerging technologies, ranging from additive manufacturing to AI, offer promise to manage health considering specific healthcare-related needs.

Mine is an Associate Professor in the UCL School of Pharmacy. 

With mounting evidence indicating that multigenerational interaction is beneficial for people of all ages, AAA has joined forces with ISO to convene a gold standard for smart multigenerational neighbourhoods. Rather than allowing segregation and risk potential ghettoisation, this presentation marks the launch of a new report which makes the case for integration and harmonisation of our neighbourhoods by foreseeing, adapting and accommodating to our needs as we journey through life. In pooling research, expertise and insights, stakeholders have the opportunity to revolutionise the design of our neighbourhoods of the future, at both the micro and macro levels.

Ian is an Honorary Professor at the UCL Bartlett School for Sustainable Construction. He's also the founder of the Agile Ageing Alliance (AAA). 

This session will highlight some of the current ‘Integration in Action’ innovations that are helping to make homes healthy, safe, and enabling greater independence in later life. It will highlight the opportunities and challenges that a vision of shifting healthcare from hospital to home can bring.   

Sue is CEO of Care & Repair England, a national housing and ageing charity. She was awarded an OBE for services to older people's housing in 2010.

The talk will set out the HAPPI design principles for an ageing population and share the findings and examples of practice to make tomorrow’s homes ‘care ready’, as captured in the recent Technology of our Ageing Population: Panel for Innovation Inquiry report.

Jeremy is Chief Executive of the Housing Learning and Improvement Network (LIN), which brings together housing, health and social care professionals to improve housing for an ageing population. 

Society is changing rapidly in the face of globalisation and technological change. The pandemic has if anything accelerated these changes. Although many have talked of the changes taking place in the world of work, in retail and on our high streets, less has been said about changes within people’s homes. Here I reflect on what we know about domestic space and its relationship to family and culture, before suggesting what might happen next.

Alan Penn is Professor of Architectural and Urban Computing at the Bartlett, UCL, and Chief Scientific Adviser at the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities.

Geoffrey Stevens and Natalie Record. from Catapult will present a halfway through review of the Connected Places Catapults Homes for Healthy Ageing Programme. HfHA is a 3-year programme to contribute towards the UK Government’s goal of supporting older people to live at home independently for 5+ years longer. The programme is establishing 5 testbeds across the UK to help build the communities and create the conditions needed to develop and test innovative solutions to healthy ageing challenges.

Geoffrey is Urban Technology Team Lead at Connected Places Catapult. He works to deploy innovative solutions that demonstrate how innovative technologies can solve complex challenges.

Natalie is Housing Innovation Lead at Connected Places Catapult. She is an Urban Planner by background. 

The presentation discusses through a handful of case studies the limitation of the current architectural paradigm to be in a constant harmony with human physiology and perception. This limitation could be met in intimate, private, healthcare and public spaces. As illustrated through these case studies it could bring vulnerable and old people in situations that compromise their health and wellbeing by “simple” architectural mistakes. In a few cases those mistakes could become life-threatening. Yet, we don’t have adequate processes to prevent those. This “safe by default” perception of architectural practice is juxtaposed to the medical paradigm and the Hippocratic Oath.

Evangelia Chrysikou is an Associate Professor at The Bartlett School of Sustainable Construction UCL, Director of the MSc Healthcare Facilities and a medical architect. She specialises in healthcare built environments.

David has worked in policy and research on ageing and demographic change for 20 years. He holds honorary positions at UCL and Newcastle University. David has a particular interest in older consumers, active ageing, financial services, adult vaccination, and the role of technology in an ageing society. He has a strong knowledge of UK and global ageing society issues, from healthcare to pensions and from housing to transport. He has published reports on a range of topics from transport to technology and health to consumption.

https://ilcuk.org.uk/

Ralitsa is a Principal Investigator of the 'Environmental impacts of digital services for health and wellbeing in the home' project which investigates the environmental impact of digital technologies and services for health and wellbeing in the home, through an innovative partnership with Orbit (housing association), Appello (a digital system developer), NHS Digital (health service provider) and UCL’s Tomorrow’s Home 2050 project.

Tom leads on the property and customer assistive technology offer across Orbit’s Independent Living, Supported Living and general housing, with a special interest in making assistive technology easier to access and understand for customers in order to improve health prospects. Part of Orbit’s Environmental Sustainability Steering Group, Tom is keen to understand and mitigate the environmental impact of services.

Kate will discuss insights from an immersive future workshop, via Tomorrow's Home, at The Museum of the Home. This aims to open up creative re-imaginings of meaningful encounters with digital services in the home, for householders with particular needs.

Dr Robin Darton is a Senior Research Fellow at the Personal Social Services Research Unit (PSSRU) at the University of Kent. He was part of the PSSRU team commissioned by the Department of Health to evaluate extra care housing schemes supported by the Extra Care Housing Fund, and was a member of the EPSRC-funded Sheffield/PSSRU team that developed the EVOLVE tool for the evaluation and assessment of extra care housing design. From 2012, he worked with colleagues from the Universities of Bristol and Worcester, Housing and Care 21 and the Housing Learning and Improvement Network on the ASSET and ECHO projects to explore the provision and delivery of adult social care in housing with care schemes. 

Ben is a chartered environmentalist and lead subject matter expert working at the interface of digital, health and sustainability. Placing equal focus on the mitigation and resilience agendas he is spearheading work to create tooling and design criteria for the design and delivery of enable low impact climate resilient digital health services.

Hearing loss is one of the leading causes of disability in older persons. For most forms of hearing loss, treatment is limited to assistive listening devices such as hearing aids, but the benefit of these devices is limited and uptake is poor. Fortunately, recent advances in artificial intelligence are driving the development of new technologies that could be transformative for people with hearing loss, not by correcting hearing loss per se, but by creating augmented realities than can alleviate the associated disability.

Nick is a Professor of Neuroengineering and a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow at the Ear Institute at University College London. His research group is focused on understanding the neural mechanisms that underlie the processing of speech and how they are impacted by hearing loss.

Our need for light often changes with age, in particular sight loss and neurological changes may make it harder for older people to see and perceive their environments. It is possible to change the lighting and the interior design of homes to permit independent living for a large number of people who would otherwise need care. The presentation will explore some of the strategies that can be employed, and in particular, how this can be done without making the home look institutional.

Peter is Professor of the Lit Environment at the Bartlett School of Environment, Energy and Resources. Peter is interested in the whole area of lighting, ranging from visual science through lamp physics, photometry through to the appearance of lit spaces.

With the emergence of full-body sensing technology, smart homes and advances in artificial intelligence come new opportunities to support people’s affective experiences and needs during self-directed ubiquitous physical rehabilitation. In our talk, we will present our work within the H2020 EnTimeMent FET project discussing how such technology could lead to more meaningful and effective chronic pain self-management by integrating physical rehabilitation in everyday activities within people’s life and home.

Nadia Bianchi-Berthouze is a Full Professor of Affective Computing and Interaction at the University College London (UCL). Her research focuses on designing technology that can sense the affective state of its users and use that information to tailor the interaction process. She investigates such questions across real-life applications eg., physical rehabilitation, circular textile economy, education and wellbeing.

Nicolas Gold is Associate Professor of Computer Science at University College London.  His research spans software engineering, ethics, and music computing, the latter currently focused on sonification and musification in healthcare, and music and making for education.

Amanda Williams is a Full Professor of clinical health psychology at University College London, working on pain. Part of her research involves contributing to the development of technology to provide the support usually offered by psychologists and physiotherapists ta make it available in real time to people with pain, wherever they are.

Sound Voice is a visionary exploration of the human voice and possibilities of collaboration. It brings together those who have experienced voice loss (e.g. affected by motor neuron disease, Parkinson's or throat cancer) alongside artists, biomedical researchers, healthcare professionals, academics and technology entrepreneurs. This inter-transdisciplinary project has revealed deep connections for all those taking part, expanding our collective knowledge and understanding of the voice. It is a demonstration how creativity is a catalyst in our thinking and helps to deliver a message to different audiences with an invitation to reflect.

Thomas Moors is a doctor and Medical Director of Sound Voice.

Simple explorations of carefully designed interactive experiences, available in public spaces, could have a positive effect on rehabilitation. Our goal is to explore the social nature of art and culture to promote creative expression and playful activity beyond the clinic or home. This talk will explore the challenges with developing robotic entities that are socially meaningful and designing interactions that can effectively capture creative expression or playful activity beyond the clinic or home while enhancing sensory/ emotional experiences, symbolic/ emotional expression, cognitive development and social connectedness.

Prof Rui Loureiro is a Full Professor at UCL and Head of the UCL Institute of Orthopaedics and Musculoskeletal Science and of Aspire’s Centre for Rehabilitation Engineering and Assistive Technology (CREATe) at UCL

• RIBA Awards Webpage
• Kirsten Dirksen Video
• BBC Arts Video
• Architects Journal Video
• UCL BERN website: The Building Envelope Research Network - UCL – University College London

Matthew Barnett Howland studied architecture at Cambridge University and the Bartlett UCL and has worked in architectural practice at Buschow Henley in London and Jestico & Whiles in Prague. Matthew is currently a Lecturer at the Bartlett School of Architecture UCL

Oliver Wilton is an Associate Professor of Environmental Design at the Bartlett School of Architecture UCL. Oliver’s research addresses architecture and environmental design from a building component to a climate scale.