DoC Academic Awarded £1.5M EPSRC Grant to Study Back Pain.

Dr Maja Pantic (Imperial College London, Computing Dept.), Nadia Berthouze (PI, University College London), Amanda Williams (University College London), and Paul Watson (University of Leicester) have been awarded an EPSRC grant for the project 'Pain rehabilitation: E/Motion-based automated coaching' for £1.5M.

The purpose of the project is to design and develop an intelligent system that will enable ubiquitous monitoring and assessment of patients’ lower-back-pain-related mood and movements inside the clinical environment (and in the longer term, outside the clinical environment). Specifically, the project aims: (a) to develop a set of methods for automatically recognising audiovisual cues related to lower back pain, behavioural patterns typical of low back pain, and affective states influencing pain, and (b) to integrate these methods into a system that will provide appropriate feedback and prompts to the patient based on his/her behaviour measured during self-directed physical therapy sessions. In doing so, the project's objective is to develop a new generation of multimodal patient-centred personal health technology.

More information about the project can be found at: http://www.uclic.ucl.ac.uk/people/n.berthouze/EPain.html

Dr Maja Pantic has been elected to be a member of the IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society Board of Governors for a 2-year term ending 31 December 2011. More information about this can be found at: http://www.ieeesmc.org/officers/index.html

Written by: rsi