Cognitive and functional assessment for telemedicine applications using Internet of Things

This is a PhD research project in Electrical Engineering.

The goal of the project will be to enable functional and cognitive assessment in telemedicine settings, and generally facilitate remote medical visits of elderly and vulnerable people using Internet-of-Things technology.

Spotting cognitive deterioration early and finding correlations between cognitive and functional ability over time are key enablers for better informing diagnosis and personalised, continuous, and pro-active interventions, ultimately leading to more successful and sustainable treatment. However, a specialist typically sees a patient every 6 months or annually , leaving large periods of time between assessments.

The proposed project will investigate, sensing, signal processing and machine learning techniques for IoT-enabled assesment during tele-visits, for instance using non-intrusive wearable sensors and/or augmented reality interfaces to collect data on activities of daily living in addition to physiological data. This type of telemedicine application would be particularly relevant in situations like the one we are experiencing, when citizens can be self-isolating, statutory service capacity constrained, and when virtual visits can offer a way for containing spread of the infection at hospitals, clinics and medical offices.