Date:

2006-2010

Themes:

Artificial Neural Networks, Complex Networks

Funding:

EPSRC

This interdisciplinary research collaboration arose within the Simple Models of Complex Networks research cluster funded by the EPSRC www.epsrca.ac.uk through the Novel Computation Initiative. Here, leading groups from the Universities of Leeds, Sheffield, Nottingham, Southampton, Royal Holloway and King’s College and industrial partners BT are brought together for the first time to develop novel amorphous computation methods based on the theory of random graphs. In particular we focus on new models with particularly relevant structural features, and on network models in a broad range of biological (neuroscience, epidemics and regulatory networks) and communication (telephone, internet) domains.

Primary investigators

• Prof Chris Cannings
• Dr. Nick Monk
• Dr. Netta Cohen
• Prof. Martin Dyer
• Prof. Vincent Jansen
• Dr Chris Watkins
• Dr Colin Desmond Cooper
• sgb
• Dr Fabrice Saffre

Secondary investigators

• Dr Jonathan Jordon
• Dr David Irons
• Richard Southwell
• Mariusz Jacyno
• Dr Orestis Chrysafis
• Dr James Watson
• Mohanaraj Velum
• Andrew Handley
• Dr Margaritis Voliotis
• Dr John Bryden
• Dr Sebastian Funk
• Dr Nic Geard

Associated research groups

• Science and Engineering of Natural Systems Group
• Agents, Interaction and Complexity

Date:

2011-2016

Themes:

Computational Economics, Complex Networks

Funding:

EPSRC

The Infrastructure Transitions Research Consortium (ITRC) will deliver research, models and decision support tools to enable analysis and planning of a robust national infrastructure system. This research project is divided into several major challenges. University of Southampton is involved in the work stream entitled "Managing Infrastructure as a Complex Adaptive System". Starting with idealised simulations and working up to the national scale, we will develop new models of how infrastructure, society and the economy evolve in the long term. We will use the simulation models to demonstrate alternative long term futures for infrastructure provision and how they might be reached. These simulation models will be combined with the techniques of evolutionary economics to explore the dynamic relationship between infrastructure provision and structural change in the economy. A further avenue will apply approaches based on network dynamics to simulate the evolution of infrastructure networks through time under a variety of external drivers. We will synthesise the most promising approaches and test them to identify patterns of emergence and to understand how in the real world these new insights may be used to steer national infrastructure systems towards sustainable outcomes.

Primary investigators

• Prof Jim Hall
• sgb
• Prof Nick Jenkins
• Dr Nick Eyre
• Prof John Preston
• Prof Chris Kilsby
• Prof Tom Curtis
• Prof William Powrie
• Prof Cliff Jones
• Dr Stuart Barr
• Prof Robert Nicholls
• Prof Pete Tyler
• Prof Mark Birkin
• Dr Jim Watson

Associated research groups

• Science and Engineering of Natural Systems Group
• Agents, Interaction and Complexity

Date:

2010-2015

Themes:

Healthcare, Simulation, Modelling and Evalution, Computational Economics

Funding:

EPSRC

In April 2010, the University of Southampton was awarded over £3million by the EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) under its ‘Complexity Science in the Real World’ initiative to carry out a 5 year multidisciplinary research project on the “Care Life Cycle: Responding to the Health and Social Care Needs of an Ageing Society�. This research programme brings together teams of researchers from social sciences, management science and complexity science to develop a suite of models representing the socio-economic and demographic processes and organisations implicated in the UK’s health and social care provision. Integral to the project is working with our partners in the public sector and communicating the results of these models to policymakers allowing them to effectively plan for the future.

Primary investigators

• Prof. J.C.Falkingham
• Prof. S.C.Brailsford
• sgb
• Prof. Maria.Evandrou

Secondary investigators

• Dr J.Bijak
• Dr A.R.Channon
• Dr J.H.Klein
• Dr R.Luff
• jn2
• Dr J.Raymer
• Dr Athina Vlachantoni
• Dr Rosalind Willis
• Dr Olga Maslovskaya
• sr1
• Dr Richard Shaw
• Dr Eric Silverman
• Dr Joe Viana

Associated research groups

• Science and Engineering of Natural Systems Group
• Agents, Interaction and Complexity

Date:

2010-2013

Themes:

Simulation, Modelling and Evalution, Complex Networks, Decentralised and Autonomous Systems

Funding:

ESRC (EP/I005943/1)

The R-Futures programme is a 3 year multidisciplinary research project considering "the future developments in the UK's energy and transport infrastructure and the resilience of these systems to natural and malicious threats and hazards". It aims to identify the resilience implications of infrastructural decision making on a 2030/2050 timescale. Relevant and compelling future scenarios as well as hazard episodes are being developed as a context for analysis. In order to avoid an artificially segregated analysis, diverse stakeholders are being engaged to characterise the horizontal cross-sectoral interdependencies between relevant infrastructures and agencies, and the vertical interplay between micro, meso and macro layers of agencies and infrastructures. Models of relevant socio-technological systems are being built in order to capture the key causal relationships between actors. A fully interactive demonstrator system that operationalises resilience for key stakeholders is also being built.

Primary investigators

• sgb
• Andrew Dainty
• Richard Dawson
• Jonathan Rigg
• Jon Timmis
• Pete Fussey
• Brooke Rogers
• Beverley Searle

Secondary investigators

• mk7
• Paul Andrews
• Julia Pearce
• Gaihua Fu
• Chris Goodier
• Daniel Sage
• Lee Bosher

Associated research groups

• Science and Engineering of Natural Systems Group
• Agents, Interaction and Complexity

Date:

2011-2014

Theme:

Pervasive Healthcare and Telemedicine

Funding:

EUFP7

Stroke is a disease with very high socio-economic impact, the third biggest cause of death and the largest single cause of severe disability in the ageing populations of Europe. The World Health Organization has estimated 1.4 million deaths in Europe from stroke in 1999 and 1.17 million Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) lost. In average the healthcare expenditure cost for Strokes across different countries in Europe and USA is 3% of their entire healthcare expenditure. This includes inpatient treatment cost, outpatient hospital visits and long-term rehabilitation and care. Analysis showed that costs of long-term care have increased from 13% to 49% of overall costs in average in recent years. Stroke has also a very serious impact on the life of affected persons. About one third of all stroke patients loose cognitive and physical abilities and return to their home with some level of permanent disability. This has significant impact on their quality of life as well as on the quality of life of their relatives. Therefore there is an urgent need for devising an effective long-term care and rehabilitation strategy for Stroke patients, which will involve the patients actively in the process while minimising costly human intervention. The StrokeBack project intends to develop an automated remote rehabilitation system by blending advances of ICT and practical clinical knowledge that will empower the patients and their immediate carer for effective application of the rehabilitation protocol in home settings. StrokeBack will combine state-of-the-art monitoring devices forming a wireless Body Area Network that enables simultaneous measurement of multiple vital parameters and currently executed movements that are particularly of interest from a Stroke rehabilitation point of view. The measured parameters will be fused using advanced feature extraction and classification algorithms processed on-body, which will denote the accuracy of the executed exercise. The training parameters along with vital data will be stored in a patient’s personal (under patient’s control) or medical (under control of the medical institution) Electronic Health Record (EHR) to which the responsible clinicians and therapists have access so that they can dynamically update the rehabilitation program. The effectiveness of the rehabilitation training and its attractiveness for patients will be enhanced through the use of game-like interface. This way doctors will be able to ensure that exercises are performed correctly and regularly, as well as easily monitor the progress of recovery having also insight into other patients’ medical parameters and results of relevant medical examinations. From the other side patients compliance will prescribed training procedures will be improved by turning the rehabilitation into an interactive game. By linking rehabilitation with Patient/Personal Electronic Health Record (PHR/EHR) the Stroke back project will offer means of correlating the rehabilitation exercises and personal activity monitoring with progressing changes in patients’ medical condition. This way the StrokeBack system will support medical practitioners in developing more reliable health care models for both prevention and rehabilitation from strokes. By employing manual intervention only when actually necessary, StrokeBack will eliminate costly human intervention and thereby significantly reduce the associated costs. The increased rehabilitation speed as well as the fact that the rehabilitation training can be done at home directly improves quality of life of patients. To sum up StrokeBack will increase rehabilitation speed and offer opportunities for prevention of stroke episodes without jeopardising the quality of care offered while significantly reducing associated health care costs. To achieve the StrokeBack goals research far beyond state of the art in the in the following fields is necessary: • telemedicine supervision of rehabilitation exercise • continuous monitoring of impact of the exercises also in “normal� life situations • integration of telemedicine rehabilitation and Personal Health Records for improved long term evaluation of patient recovery providing feedback to health care professionals on the impact of rehabilitation exercise

Primary investigator

• Koushik Maharatna

Secondary investigators

• Neil White
• Nick Harris
• awc
• Jane Burridge
• Bashir Al-Hashimi

Partner

• 7 EU partners

Associated research groups

• Electronic Systems and Devices Group
• Electronic and Software Systems
• Electronics and Electrical Engineering
• Pervasive Systems Centre

Date:

2011-2014

Theme:

Pervasive Healthcare and Telemedicine

Funding:

EUFP7

Quantitative EEG is used in medical laboratories to determine the brain connectivity in autistic children but due to the artificial nature of this lab-based approach its validity under a real-life scenario is doubtful. Also therapeutic interventions are executed typically in a clinical setting and have a limited extension in time while it has been proved the beneficial effect of an intensive intervention. Moreover, although pointed out by several researcher the need of a personalized treatment for each child, there is a little knowledge about how to identify the most suitable treatment or integration of treatments for a specific child. The MICHELANGELO project intends to bring the assessment and the therapy of the autism out of the clinical environment and develop a patient-centric home-based intervention solution requiring a minimal human involvement and therefore extremely cost effective. The main outcomes of the project are intended to address both the assessment and the therapeutic intervention in autistic children :

1. Autism Assessment • A camera-based system that – triggered by a wearable EEG solution – will take snapshots of the scenes according to the eye movement and will allow to identify the stimuli that in a natural environment (the child’s home) cause significant responses in the autistic child; • The same pervasive wearable EEG system that - used in conjunction with an eye-tracking device - measures the brain activity while the patient is presented with the reproduction of the identified stimuli and allows to better characterize them. The eye tracking system will record the eyes’ fixations and will enable to see how the brain connectivity changes with naturalistic stimuli and allows determining the particular properties of the objects (e.g. shape, colour etc.) the child is looking at and most responsible for the abnormal brain wave behaviour. The system - being pervasive in nature - makes the patient “less aware� about the artificial nature of the experiment and therefore affects the cognitive activity far less than the currently employed systems. • A set of advanced and sophisticated signal processing algorithms enabling accurate characterisation of stimulation-specific brainwave anomalies and connectivity between different brain regions and hence giving vivid insight into the process of information integration ability of the brain in a stimulus-specific way. 2. Autism Therapy • The design of a personalized intervention protocol based on a heterogeneous strategy where well consolidated developmental/behavioural thera peutic approaches are combined with neurophysiologically established new connectivity-guided neuro feedback techniques. Intervention will use also ICT-based solutions such as virtual reality, serious game and robotics. • A set of unobtrusive tools for the continuous monitoring of the autistic children during the therapeutic program allowing the adaptation and personalization of the intervention. They include a wearable multi-parametric platform measuring relevant vital signs together with a camera-based system for the recognition of repetitive behaviors. • Sophisticated algorithms for advanced imaging techniques (Diffusion Tensor Imaging and fMRI) which are used by the doctor to check the anatomical and functional connectivity of the brain at different steps during the therapy and assess its effectiveness. • A novel system enabling intensive intervention in “patient-centric� way in the home settings with minimal human intervention leading to significant cost reduction while substantially enhancing effective clinical outcome. Finally the MICHELANGELO project will set the bases to validate the results of its research work in an exploratory study executed in Italy and in France.

Primary investigator

• Koushik Maharatna

Secondary investigators

• Srinandan Dasmahapatra
• Mike Wald
• Bashir Al-Hashimi
• wj4g08

Partner

• 7 EU partners

Associated research groups

• Electronic and Software Systems
• Pervasive Systems Centre

Date:

2010-2013

Theme:

Pervasive Healthcare and Telemedicine

Funding:

Artemis Joint Undertaking EU

The CHIRON Project intends to combine state-of-the art technologies and innovative solutions into an integrated framework designed for an effective and person-centric health management along the complete care cycle. In this vision, a. CHIRON will address and harmonize the needs and interests of all the three main beneficiaries of the healthcare process, i.e., the citizens using the services, the medical professionals and the whole community; b. CHIRON will position the citizens at the core of the whole healthcare cycle by considering them as “persons� with specificities and identities and will empower them to manage their own health; c. CHIRON will enlarge the boundaries of healthcare by fostering a seamless integration of clinical setting, at home setting and mobile setting in a concept of a continuum of care; d. CHIRON will speed up the move from treatment of acute episodes to prevention; e. CHIRON will provide the physicians with extensive support for treatment monitoring and management, timely decisions and appropriate actions in both the clinical and home environments; More specifically CHIRON intends: a. to design – according to this integrated approach – a reference architecture for personal healthcare which will ensure the interoperability between heterogeneous devices and services, a reliable and secure patient data management and a seamless integration with the clinical workflow; b. to develop sophisticated solutions of complex data analysis, feature extraction and knowledge management; c. to introduce beyond state of the art solutions in various specific parts of the system; d. to provide new, advanced tools for real time processing, computer-aided analysis and accurate visualization of medical images; and e. to validate the result of the research and assess the proposed solutions in relation to their technical and clinical aspects and from a socio-economic perspective. The CHIRON system will provide powerful supporting ICT tools and at the same time it will ensure that the patients and the doctors remain the protagonists of the healthcare process that has been designed around them.

Primary investigator

• Koushik Maharatna

Secondary investigators

• Srinandan Dasmahapatra
• Mahesan Niranjan
• Bashir Al-Hashimi

Partner

• 27 EU partners

Associated research groups

• Electronic and Software Systems
• Pervasive Systems Centre

Date:

2011-2012

Theme:

Accessible Technologies

Funding:

Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) and the Technology Strategy Board