Engineering A Novel Mobile Assistive Technology to Improve Quality of Life, Independence and Medical Condition Management in Individuals with Healthca

个人移动的技术（例如，智能手机、可穿戴技术等）具有很大的潜力，可以有效地用作辅助设备，以改善有健康相关需求的个人的生活质量。这可以从旨在支持基于用户收集的关于自己的信息的行为改变的自我跟踪系统，到旨在支持用户在重大健康事件后恢复独立的康复技术。这一新兴领域仍处于起步阶段，在设计和评价方法专门知识以及在实践中使用此类技术的有效性的纵向证据方面，对科学知识的重大贡献尚待实现。该博士项目的目的是，因此，设计，开发和评估一种新的移动的辅助技术，有可能显着和积极的影响生活质量，独立性和医疗保健管理能力的个人在心理健康领域的特殊或医疗保健相关的需求。在这样做的过程中，它将有助于新兴的工程和健康领域，并扩大以人为本的设计领域的专门知识，特别是在适应性方法方面，为非典型用户群体进行设计和评估。该项目的主要目标是，它将有利于公民在选定的研究社区（它可以被认为是一个边缘化的使用社区），有助于提高生活质量，提高他们的独立性和最大限度地提高效益-在医疗保健方面-个人的大量数据，可以通过使用普遍的，移动的技术收集/生成。

Personal mobile technologies (e.g., smartphones, wearable technology, etc.) have significant potential to be used effectively as assistive devices to improve the quality of life for individuals with health-related needs. This can range from self-tracking systems designed to support behaviour change based on information users collect about themselves through to rehabilitative technology designed to support users in regaining independence following a significant health event. This emerging field is still in its infancy, with scope for significant contribution to scientific knowledge yet to be realised in terms of design and evaluation methodological know-how as well as longitudinal evidence of the efficacy of the use of such technologies in practice. The aim of this PhD project is, therefore, to design, develop and evaluate a novel mobile assistive technology that has the potential to significantly and positively impact the quality of life, independence and healthcare management capabilities of individuals with special or healthcare-related needs in the field of mental health. In so doing, it will contribute to the emerging field of engineering and health as well as to expanding know-how in the field of human-centred design, notably in terms of adaptive methodologies for designing and evaluating with atypical user groups. The key objective of this project is that it will benefit citizens within the chosen community of study (who it can be argued represent a marginalised community of use), contributing to an improved quality of life by enhancing their independence and maximising the benefit - in a healthcare context - to the individual of the vast quantities of data that can be collected/generated via the use of pervasive, mobile technologies.