PhD Studentship: Designing and Evaluating New Digital Technologies For HealthCare in Hospitals

Short info about job

Detail information about job PhD Studentship: Designing and Evaluating New Digital Technologies For HealthCare in Hospitals. Terms and conditions vacancy

Applications are invited for a PhD studentship in the UCL Interaction Centre, funded by an EPSRC DTP grant for up to 4 years from October 2017 later in 17-18.

Please be aware that this funding is only available to UK/EU citizens with settled status in the UK, residing in the UK for 3 years prior to the start of the studentship and not wholly for the purpose of education. See http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/skills/studentships/help/eligibility/. 

A central concern facing NHS hospitals is determining which of the many technologies being promoted by tech companies (eg. virtual reality, wearables, public displays, IoT etc) will deliver improved patient outcomes and be sustainable. Many remain untested and it is unclear how a hospital should decide which to invest in and how best to develop specific services to improve patient experience while also enhancing hospital healthcare practices. Furthermore, what is the optimal process for handling new streams of such digitized data?

In collaboration with one of the world’s leading hospitals for children, Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH), we are investigating how to design new technologies for future hospitals to improve the lives of patients, their families and clinicians by co-creating a people-centred approach to designing and deploying intelligent healthcare systems that are usable, cost effective and safe. The student will run experiments in an innovative ‘living lab’, which includes a dedicated ‘virtual hospital’ in which ‘mock ups’ of scenarios such as outpatient clinics, inpatient beds, and procedures, as well as non-clinical areas, can be modelled to investigate the impact of different configurations of new technologies. 

Within this broad remit, there are a number of possible PhD projects that could be explored. These include, but are not limited to: 

(i) monitoring parents and patient experiences with a view to sharing and presenting the data back to them.

(ii) exploring ‘intelligent’ result presentation for clinicians (e.g. data streams from laboratories or theatres but also ‘active intelligent’ results presentation). This requires considering how to depict and display the many streams of data that will be engaging for patients, visitors, clinicians and others, using smart walls and other physical visualizations.

(iii) developing new forms of result presentation that can help surgeons and consultants make sense of the ever-increasing forms of data monitoring (e.g. data streams in theatres but also ‘intelligent’ pathology results presentation; eg., comparing different patients’ results with other similar patients) 

Person Specification

Applicants should be interested in Human-Computer Interaction and possess a Masters degree in a related discipline. Candidates should also have an interest and experience in physical computing, data analytics and interaction design.

Applying

Please apply through the UCL PRISM system by 10 September 2017 using the Apply button. Please include:

Interviews with short-listed applicants will be 18th September 2017. 

Questions about the studentship can be made to Prof Yvonne Rogers ([email protected]); queries about the application process can be made to Louise Gaynor: [email protected] or Sarah Turnbull: [email protected].