[visionlist] PhD studentship | Swansea University, UK

[Xie X.]

Automatic Sensing, Active monitoring and Memory Enforcing (ASAME): 
A pre-clinical dementia mobile phone technology to facilitate early diagnosis and care.

Project and aims
Various assistive technologies have been designed for people disagnosed with dementia particularly at moderate to severe stages of the disease.  However, people with high risk of dementia and those at the earlier stage of the disease receive very little care of support from health services due to their ability to live independently, which will however diminish should the disease develop or progress.  Early interventions hence are desirable in order to help them to maintain their independent living and to reduce the cost of care in long term.
The growing number of ubiquitous technology, Smartphones in particular, provides an ideal platform for deploying assistive technologies for these groups of people.  In this PhD, as assistive living application for Smartphones for these groups will be designed, implemented and tested.  This application provides vital independence support and functions in an automatic fashion via gathering and analysing user data over a long period of time and doesn’t require any user input during the daily activities.  In contrast to the other applications for dementia care, our proposed app has the ability not only to track users but more importantly to learn their activity patterns, which enables us for example to detect “wandering” patterns and alert relatives or carers.

Supervisor
Dr Parisa Eslambolchilar, Department of Computer Science, Swansea University
Dr Jason Xie, Department of Computer Science, Swansea University

Applicant requirements
The successful candidate will have or is about to receive a 1st or upper second class degree in computer science with strong skills in high level and low level programming such as QT, C++ and Android, in signal processing, and building interfaces on mobile platforms. 

Funding
This project is funded through a Swansea University scholarship. The student will receive an annual stipend of £13,726 plus UK/EU fees (possible increase in 2nd/3rd year). Start date is 1 October 2013.

Application closing date: 8 April 2013

Xianghua
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Senior Lecturer in Computer Vision,
Swansea University, United Kingdom
http://csvision.swansea.ac.uk