Humans and technology: in life and in death

Smart homes, home automation and ambient-assisted living are terms used to describe systems that enrich our living environment and provide means to support care and well-being. Demographic changes in society including ageing, the increase in chronic diseases and persons with dementia has given rise to technological innovations to enable smart care at home. In this talk I will outline some of these technologies including sensors, biomedical devices, and social robots and describe how underpinning artificial intelligence is applied to deliver care and services to persons living at home.

Most deaths in low income settings are not recorded because people tend to die at home. This often means no autopsy or death certificate. Knowing how people die is crucial for health institutions to decide how to best invest their limited resources. This talk will describe MIVA – an app to enable fieldworkers to carry out verbal autopsies - interviewing family members using questions from the World Health Organization. MIVA analyses answers to calculate a probable cause of death. The talk will describe lessons learned from its use in Malawi, South Africa and Nepal & MIVA’s ongoing development.

Have you ever read non-fiction comics? Have you ever read comics online? What even are online comics? Researchers are starting to investigate how online comics can be used to influence, explore and understand medicine, illness, life and death. Find out all about the world of “Graphic Medicine” in this talk. If you’re feeling in the dark about the world of online comics, 'Life and Death in Comics" will put you in the picture.

What's it like to have a mental health crisis? How would an understanding of that experience improve the care of patients? It is often quite difficult to convey issues like emotion and mental distress in a 2D didactic teaching experience. However using Virtual Reality (VR), there is scope to fully immerse the student in the experience of the patient and see through their eyes. This talk will introduce CityVIEW, a VR experience aimed to develop empathy for mental health conditions with nursing students. You will learn about our progress and the lessons learnt using VR in learning contexts.

What if you woke up one morning and were no longer able to speak? Could a computer help you re-learn how to communicate? This talk will introduce you to the cutting edge technology being used to do just this for people whose language system has stopped working properly due to stroke (a problem called aphasia). You will learn how gesture recognition and virtual worlds are offering a voice to the voiceless and how research is helping use to fit these two strands of health and technology together.