October 2025
Last month I started sharing this newsletter on LinkedIn too, and now more than 350 of you are receiving it, thank you!
October was a month of heads-down work and some exciting milestones. Here’s what’s been happening and what will come next.
📱MEMoPAD Updates
We’ve updated the app UI based on feedback from Phase IV participants and expert roundtable. This means the old demos (Mobile&Wearable App trailer and Web App Demo) are now outdated. It’s amazing to see this tool evolving and be shaped by insights coming from such different perspectives over this co-design journey!
Phase V will happen in a few months (target: early Q1 2026). If you’ve applied to participate, you’ll timely hear from us with more specific scheduling details. And if you know anyone interested in this project, this is a great moment to involve them as well.
📄Published in Nature Machine Intelligence
Our community paper just came out: “Towards deployment-centric multimodal AI beyond vision and language.”
48 authors. 22 institutions. One core idea: Build AI that actually works in the real world, not just in labs.
Most multimodal AI combines vision + language. But real-world problems need richer data: biosignals, sensor streams, behavioral patterns.
I contributed to two sections: Multimodal AI in Social Science and Health. The key argument? Start with the problem, not the algorithm. Ask “What are we solving?” before “What data can we fuse?”
This is exactly how we approach MEMoPAD. Technology only matters if people can actually use it. Co-design beats clever theory every time.
Grateful to lead authors Dr. Xianyuan Liu and Prof. Haiping Lu (University of Sheffield), The Alan Turing Institute, and the UK Open Multimodal AI Network. And to my supervisor Dr David Western for pushing me into the multimodal AI community, it’s opened unexpected doors.
📄 Read it:
Towards deployment-centric multimodal AI beyond vision and language | Nature Machine Intelligence Click here for the free access Or here for the Press release
📅 What’s Coming
November 9 - Cardiff
Presenting our position paper on MEMoPAD’s first three co-design stages at the BCS HCI 2025 ‘Co-Designing Human-Centred AI Technologies for Health and Wellbeing’ workshop. Work done in collaboration with Carmel McGrath and Lucy Condon from NIHR ARC West and University Hospitals Bristol, that some of you already had the pleasure to know for other initiatives.
November 14 - Bristol
LEAP Community Sandpit at Trinity Centre (10:30-14:30). Digital Health Community Innovators will present real challenges and experts from different fields will have the chance to offer support in working to address them. Teams form on the day and can apply for up to £10,000 seed funding.
If you applied as a community innovator last month, see you there!
📝 Last-minute applications for professionals by Nov 5 (today!): LEAP Community Sandpit | LEAP Digital Health Hub
💭 Final Thought
October felt like a behind-the-scenes month: refining prototypes, submitting ethics application for a side sensory-wearable integration study (HUG x Smartsocks), preparing study protocols and presentations. But this is when the important work happens: making sure what we build actually works when it meets real people.
If you’re working on deployment-focused AI, co-design methods, or wearable health tech, I’d love to hear what you’re tackling. If you’re considering taking part in our ongoing co-design journey and have any questions, please feel free to ask me.
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