Achievements & Milestones
Funding, publications and co-design progress, newest first. Choose a category below. Abstracts, PDFs and citations are on the Publications page.
Funding & Awards
Joined the UKRI Mental Health Platform as an Associate Member
Associate members are researchers not based at the Platform's hubs who share its aims and values. About MHP associate membership
Won the Stress category of the SmartSocks DISCOVERY Pioneers Competition
Awarded Milbotix SmartSocks DISCOVERY kits (worth £1,000) to test sock-based sensing as an alternative to smartwatches for emotion monitoring in anxiety disorders. See the competition winners
Secured an NHS BNSSG ICB grant
Secured a £1,500 grant for patient and public involvement and engagement (PPIE) activities from NHS Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire Integrated Care Board.
Secured a CATE Student Internship
Secured a '2024/25 CATE Student Internship' grant (£2,000) for Louis Robinson from UWE Bristol, to support the development of the working prototype.
Accepted as an EPS Postgraduate Member
Granted postgraduate membership of the Experimental Psychology Society (EPS).
Secured the CATE Public Engagement Fund
Awarded £3,000 from UWE Bristol's '2024-25 CATE Public/Community Engagement & Knowledge Exchange Project Fund' to support the project's PPIE activities.
Accepted as an IHT Fellow
Welcomed into the Innovate Healthier Together community, dedicated to reimagining health and care across Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire (BNSSG, NHS). About the IHT Fellowship
Secured a sponsored research visit
Selected for a sponsored research visit at the University of Bristol, focusing on affective computing implementations. Supervised by Zahraa Abdallah and sponsored by MaVi: Machine Learning and Computer Vision.
Won the Best Student Poster Award
Our poster was awarded 'Best Student Poster' at the Second Workshop on Multimodal AI, organised by the University of Sheffield and the Alan Turing Institute. View post
Secured a PhD scholarship
Awarded a full PhD scholarship at UWE Bristol, including £3,000 for project expenses. See the UWE REACH members page
Publications & Presentations
Talk and poster at the MHP Research Summit 2026
MEMoPAD's co-design story was selected, by an external panel that included people with lived experience, for both a talk and a poster at the Mental Health Platform Research Summit in Sheffield on 8 October 2026.
Demo paper and live demo at ACM Interactive Health 2026
Published a demo paper and presented a live, interactive demo of the MEMoPAD prototype in Porto to researchers, industry and policy makers, collecting feedback from stakeholders outside the co-design journey. Read the paper
Book chapter on emotion patterns in speech for Alzheimer’s disease
Co-authored with Dr Zahraa Abdallah and Yingxue Guan (University of Bristol): 'Identifying emotion patterns in speech for Alzheimer's disease assessment: A novel perspective', exploring how affective computing could support assessment in neurodegenerative disorders. Read the chapter
Short paper at the CHI 2026 workshop
Published a short paper at the Engagement in Digital Health Interventions Workshop, exploring how our PPIE activities, in both method and results, sustain stakeholder engagement in MEMoPAD. Read the short paper (page 77)
Position paper at BCS HCI 2025
Published a position paper on the first three stages of our co-design at the 'Co-Designing Human-Centered AI Technologies for Health and Wellbeing' workshop, in collaboration with Carmel McGrath and Lucy Condon (NIHR ARC West; University Hospitals Bristol and Weston NHS Foundation Trust). See position papers
Co-authored a Perspective in Nature Machine Intelligence
'Towards deployment-centric multimodal AI beyond vision and language': a 48-author community paper led by the University of Sheffield and the Alan Turing Institute. I contributed to the sections on social science and health. Read the paper · Open-access version
Technical poster at the 3rd Multimodal AI Workshop
Presented a technical poster introducing our approach to multimodal, contextualised affective computing analysis of longitudinal data, in collaboration with Vincenzo Dentamaro (University of Bari). Also won the workshop's 'best human photo about multimodal AI' prize. View all abstracts
Paper at HEALTHINF 2025
Published 'Affective Computing in Anxiety Disorders: A Rapid Literature Review of Emotion Recognition Applications' at the 18th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies. The paper was selected for a post-publication invitation. Read the paper
Presented at an NIHR ARC West & University of Bristol event
Presented at 'Researcher coffee catch-up: Digital solutions for anxiety disorders', organised by NIHR Applied Research Collaboration West (ARC West). See event
Published 2 abstracts at the DMHW 2024 Conference
Presented MEMoPAD and published the abstracts at the Second International Digital Mental Health and Wellbeing Conference, Ulster University. View published abstracts
Presented at the 'AI in Precision Psychiatry' workshop
An event hosted by the Elizabeth Blackwell Institute and the Bristol Neuroscience Network at the University of Bristol. Watch video
Invited speaker at the University of Aberdeen
Talk: 'Emotion recognition can support the early detection of neurodegenerative diseases', at the AI & Computer Vision for Neurodegenerative Diseases workshop of BMVC 2023. See event
Publishing collaboration
Published 'An approach using transformer architecture for emotion recognition through electrocardiogram signal(s)', co-authored with Dr Vincenzo Dentamaro, former CTO at IntelliHearts. Read paper
Co-Design & Milestones
Co-Design Phase VI under way
The 'Post-design' phase takes MEMoPAD out of the lab: 10 participants in Bristol are using the working watch and companion app in their daily lives for up to five weeks. Recruitment is now closed. Thank you to everyone who applied.
Co-Design Phase V completed
Concluded the 'Implementation' phase with 16 lab participants and online surveys for patients and clinicians, collecting feedback for the next iteration of the prototype. Method: lab-controlled data collection sessions. Analysis: physiological time-series analysis; expert roundtable.
HUG×SmartSocks study completed
A parallel study exploring emotional responses in people reporting anxiety while using HUG and wearing Milbotix SmartSocks.
Co-Design Phase IV completed
Concluded the 'Evaluative' phase with 25 participants, collecting feedback on the user interface and experience. Method: focus groups, interviews and demo. Analysis: affinity diagrams and comparative analysis; expert roundtable.
Co-Design Phase III completed
Concluded the 'Prototype' phase with 19 participants, gathering ideas for the user interface and experience. Method: focus groups, interviews and mock-ups. Analysis: affinity diagrams and comparative analysis; expert roundtable.
Co-Design Phase II completed
Concluded the 'Generative' phase with 20 participants, defining core features and user requirements. Method: focus groups, interviews and storyboards. Analysis: thematic and comparative; expert roundtable.
Co-Design Phase I completed
Concluded the 'Pre-design' phase with 24 participants, exploring the problems and needs of the different stakeholders. Method: focus groups, interviews and whiteboard. Analysis: thematic and comparative; expert roundtable.
Co-Design Phase 0 completed
Concluded the 'Recruiting Material Consultations' phase with 14 participants (8 patients and 6 clinicians). Method: focus groups, interviews and surveys. Analysis: affinity diagrams.
Interested in what's next?
These milestones represent years of research and collaboration. If you're exploring partnerships, funding opportunities, or ways to bring this work into your organisation, let's connect.
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