��Ī - mobile phone

Flip the switch: the tech in 35 million phones

sc604 — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 07:00:00 +0000

How tiny vibrations in minute metal structures – and a little bit of luck – helped make mobile phones faster and more efficient.

Under pressure: the battle to have a baby in Africa

lw355 — Thu, 16 Feb 2017 09:40:43 +0000

As a young doctor in Uganda a few years ago, Dr Annettee Nakimuli was told that nothing could be done about a complication of pregnancy that was putting thousands of pregnant women a year at risk of death.

She remembers the frustration: “I felt like we were accomplices in this war of sorts. People say we do not remember the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends. I did not want to accept that it was beyond hope.”

The disease is pre-eclampsia, a condition that is thought to be caused by the placenta developing abnormally. Women with pre-eclampsia often experience very high blood pressure, which can be fatal without medical intervention. Although the condition affects women worldwide, in African women it is more common and particularly severe. It also occurs earlier in pregnancy and can recur in subsequent pregnancies.

“What makes pre-eclampsia such a challenge is it has been impossible to predict or prevent,” explains Professor Ashley Moffett, from ��Ī’s Department of Pathology and Centre for Trophoblast Research, who is an expert on the disease.

“It’s been called the ‘silent killer’ because many women cannot feel the danger sign that their blood pressure is rising until it’s too late. Even when it is detected the only course of action is constant monitoring, and ultimately the only cure is delivery – sometimes at too early a stage for the baby to survive,” adds Moffett.

The silent killer

Nakimuli knows only too well the difficulties that African women face. Today she’s an obstetrician in Mulago Hospital, Kampala, where 33,000 babies are born each year. It has the highest number of live births of any hospital in the world (around 100 per day), and 15% of pregnancies develop life-threatening complications such as pre-eclampsia, haemorrhage, obstructed labour and sepsis. She describes herself and her colleagues as being “on the front line” in the battle against death in pregnancy and childbirth.

“I would often see women who had had four or more Caesarean sections with no living child – they continued exposing themselves to the danger until they had a baby,” says Nakimuli, who is also a lecturer at Makerere University. “I felt like not sitting back and just saying this is a disease with theories.”

Seven years ago, she began work with Moffett through the ��Ī-Africa Programme, first as a MUII PhD fellow registered at Makerere University, then as a MUII postdoctoral fellow and now as a research collaborator. Based in Kampala throughout, she would periodically travel to ��Ī to learn new techniques, analyse samples and spend time with Moffett trying to unravel why a complex disease is so much worse in Africa.

A few years earlier, Moffett had discovered that, when the placenta is formed, a remarkable ‘boundary-setting’ process occurs between the mother and the fetus deep within the lining of the womb.

“The placenta must invade the mother enough to access nourishment for the growing baby, yet not so much as to penetrate through the uterus,” she explains. “Placentation is a setting up of the territorial boundary between two genetically different individuals – the mother and her baby, who carries genes from the father. It needs to be in exactly the right place for both to survive and thrive.”

Moffett found that maternal immune cells called uterine natural killer cells mediate the compromise between mother and baby. These cells have unique proteins on their surface called killer-cell immunoglobulin receptors (KIRs), which recognise proteins called MHC on the invading fetal cells. Certain combinations of maternal KIR genes and fetal MHC genes are associated with pre-eclampsia, whereas other KIR genes appear to protect against the disease.

But why would women of African descent suffer so much more from pre-eclampsia than other women? “There was an assumption in Africa that there was a socioeconomic reason, like poverty,” says Nakimuli. “I was convinced that there was something biological.”

Nakimuli set about recruiting 750 mothers at Mulago Hospital to what is the largest genetic study of pre-eclampsia conducted in Africa. She collected blood and umbilical cord samples and, in ��Ī, ‘typed’ the DNA to look at all the genetic variation. “It was kind of a high-risk project, but my determination kept my hope alive. I wanted to find big things.”

Her hunch proved right. She found that the KIR genes that protect African women against pre-eclampsia are different from those that protect European women. Moreover, the risky combination of maternal KIR and fetal MHC proteins occurs at a much higher frequency in sub-Saharan Africa than anywhere else in the world.

We think that women of African ancestry may have these risk genes because of certain beneficial selective pressures, otherwise why would genes that kill mothers and babies be so common in the population?
Ashley Moffett

The findings immediately opened up new avenues of research into the biology of pre-eclampsia. The study also has implications for understanding infectious diseases, as Moffett explains: “We think that women of African ancestry may have these risk genes because of certain beneficial selective pressures, otherwise why would genes that kill mothers and babies be so common in the population? People with the gene that causes sickle-cell anaemia are able to fend off malaria – perhaps something similar is happening for KIR genes? And so now we are starting work to see whether the genes are protecting against infections such as measles, HIV and malaria.”

Africa's Voices

While Nakimuli and Moffett continue pinpointing the genetic basis of pre-eclampsia, and hope to bring out the first comprehensive textbook on African obstetrics, they are aware that one of the key issues surrounding pregnancy is that too many African women go to hospital too late, leaving it until their complications are advanced and dangerous.

“There’s a general lack of awareness and understanding,” explains Nakimuli. “There isn’t even an Ugandan word for pre-eclampsia. The closest people get to describing the condition is ‘having hypertension which is different from the other hypertension when you’re not pregnant’. It becomes a mouthful.”

Last year she took part in a series of radio programmes in Uganda as ‘Doctor Annettee’, the on-air doctor ready to answer questions from the audience. The programmes were part of an innovative ��Ī-led research project, ‘Africa’s Voices’, which uses interactive radio and mobile communications to gather and analyse the views of ordinary citizens.

“Because of the high rates of maternal mortality, a coping mechanism among Ugandan women is to consider pregnancy as being about bravery and fortitude,” says Nakimuli. “This way of coping might however lead to late self-diagnosis of the warning signs.”

“Sociocultural beliefs like coping mechanisms will determine how people behave,” says Dr Sharath Srinivasan, who is Head of ��Ī’s Centre of Governance and Human Rights and leads Africa’s Voices, “and so it’s important to understand a person’s thinking to support better maternal and neonatal health policies.”

However, the challenge has always been how to collect and assess all of the different ‘voices’ from hard-to-reach African communities. Srinivasan and colleagues realised that Africa’s digital revolution – particularly the widespread use of mobile phones and SMS messaging – could provide the answer when combined with the huge popularity of local radio stations and the team’s technical know-how.

The team developed a format in which a radio presenter would play a real-life testimonial – such as a woman relaying the complications of her pregnancy – and then invite listeners to reply to a related question by sending a text to a toll-free number. Each respondent would subsequently receive an SMS sociodemographic survey to complete.

“What makes this set-up so rich is the fact that ordinary citizens are encouraged to voice their views. They aren’t restricted by a poll-style yes/no answer,” says Srinivasan. “We’ve developed a methodology that can take this data, which is often complex, unstructured and in more than one local language, and analyse it with qualitative social science and computational techniques to draw out key themes and insights.”

During Africa’s Voices pilot phase, the team used this format in eight sub-Saharan countries, working with nine radio stations, and choosing radio presenters who have a good relationship with their audience. In these ‘social spaces’, they probed beliefs on HIV/AIDS, vaccination, women’s issues, agriculture and governance processes.

Now spun-out of the University as a non-profit organisation, Africa’s Voices works in East Africa with NGOs, health agencies and media organisations, and maintains strong links with researchers such as Nakimuli and Moffett.

An interactive radio project to shed light on pregnancy complications like pre-eclampsia was recently completed with three local language radio stations in Kampala, Uganda, and rich insights emerged into the perceived causes of complications in pregnancy. One finding is the difference in beliefs between men and women.

“Men, more than women, tend to think that the causes of complications are related to enduring traits of the mothers – their biology or their personality – but that the risk of complications is more likely to happen to other women, not their own partner,” explains Srinivasan.

“Women on the other hand are more likely to believe that complications arise because of factors that they can control – such as their lifestyle. Both women and men agree that insufficient health provision is the major reason women delay seeking healthcare.”

Srinivasan suggests from his experience that governments and service deliverers are keen to listen intelligently to what people are saying and to organise their work more attentively to the world views and collective beliefs of the populations they serve. “Sociocultural beliefs that limit the seeking of healthcare are addressable,” he says. “Interventions that engage women and communities in conversations can help change beliefs, opinions and norms, and thus behaviour patterns.”

"We needed to study the disease in Africa"

When Nakimuli is asked what her own research findings on the genetics of pre-eclampsia will mean for the mothers she sees every day on the wards at Mulago hospital, she is pragmatic.

“Can it help medically? We are still far from that,” she says. “Yes, theoretically we can predict risk by genotyping pregnant mothers, but we are in a low-resource setting – everything needs to be cost-effective. Really we need to develop a bedside test that doesn’t require costly and time-consuming laboratory analysis. Then we could know which women need to be monitored carefully.”

Sociocultural beliefs that limit the seeking of healthcare are addressable. Interventions that engage women and communities in conversations can help change beliefs, opinions and norms, and thus behaviour patterns

Sharath Srinivasan

In the seven years since Nakimuli first embarked on her studies to understand why so many women die in pregnancy, ��Ī-Africa research partnerships with Mulago Hospital have widened considerably. They now include pharmacist Dr Ronald Kiguba and Professor Sheila Bird OBE (Medical Research Council Biostatistics Unit, ��Ī) investigating how to report medication errors and adverse drug reactions; microbiologist Dr David Kateete and Professor Stephen Bentley (Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute) tracking how infections like MRSA spread through hospitals; and a group of obstetricians and midwives from ��Ī University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust looking at best practice with their contemporaries in Kampala.

Meanwhile, a typical day at Mulago Hospital will bring around five pre-eclamptic pregnancies and several cases of obstructed labour, preterm birth and stillbirths; and a team of five doctors will be supervising 80–100 deliveries.

Funds are being sought by ��Ī-Africa to help set up an African Centre of Excellence in Pregnancy and Childbirth at Mulago Hospital, in partnership with Makerere University’s College of Health Sciences. “We would like to train more specialised staff who in turn will train the next generation, and we want to turn new understanding of pregnancy complications into clinical interventions,” explains Nakimuli.

Looking back to when she decided not to accept that nothing could be done about pre-eclampsia, Nakimuli says: “I was convinced that the reason we didn’t know much about the disease was because we’d been looking in the wrong place. We needed to study the disease in Africa. After all, if you want to study a disease properly, then you should look at the population most affected by it.”

Dr Annettee Nakimuli was funded by the Makerere University-Uganda Virus Research Institute Infection and Immunity Research Training Programme (MUII).

Inset images: Top: Dr Annettee Nakimuli; Bottom: radio interview with 'Dr Annettee' at Akaboozi FM in Kampala, Uganda, as part of the Africa's Voices study (credit: Rainbow Wilcox, Africa's Voices).

To keep up to date with the latest stories about ��Ī’s engagement with Africa, follow #CamAfrica on Twitter.

A complication of pregnancy that causes the mother’s blood pressure to rise – often fatally – is more common in women of African descent than any other. Research in Uganda by African and ��Ī researchers is helping to uncover why.

I felt like we were accomplices in this war of sorts. People say we do not remember the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends. I did not want to accept that it was beyond hope

Annettee Nakimuli

DFID

Suffering from pre-eclampsia, this young mother had to undergo a Caesarean to deliver her twin boys, seen here in the arms of her mother (Malawi)

Graduate, get a job … make a difference #6

��Ī graduates enter a wide range of careers but making a difference tops their career wish lists. Read about Kathryn Savage who now works in Uganda to improve health service delivery and increase utilisation by strengthening the leadership skills of health workers and district health teams. 'Graduate, get a job … make a difference' is a series in which inspiring graduates from the last three years describe ��Ī, their current work and their determination to give back.

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What can Pokémon Go teach the world of conservation?

Anonymous — Wed, 16 Nov 2016 15:37:01 +0000

A new paper by a group of researchers from the Universities of Oxford and ��Ī, UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Centre, and University College London (UCL) explores whether Pokémon Go's success in getting people out of their homes and interacting with virtual 'animals' could be replicated to redress what is often perceived as a decline in interest in the natural world among the general public.

Or, could the game's popularity pose more problems than opportunities for conservation?

Study author Leejiah Dorward, a doctoral candidate in Oxford University's Department of Zoology, said: "When Pokémon Go first came out, one of the most striking things was its similarity with many of the concepts seen in natural history and conservation. The basic facts and information about Pokémon Go make it sound like an incredibly successful citizen science project, rather than a smartphone game.

"We wanted to explore how the success of Pokémon Go might create opportunities or challenges for the conservation movement."

Co-author John C Mittermeier, a doctoral candidate in Oxford's School of Geography and the Environment, said: "There is a widespread belief that interest in natural history is waning and that people are less interested in spending time outside and exploring the natural world.

"Pokémon Go is only one step removed from natural history activities like bird watching or insect collecting: Pokémon exist as 'real' creatures that can be spotted and collected, and the game itself has been getting people outdoors. What’s going on here, and can we as conservationists take advantage of it?"

In the paper, the researchers explain that Pokémon Go has been shown to inspire high levels of behavioural change among its users, with people making significant adjustments to their daily routines and to the amount of time spent outside in order to increase their chances of encountering target 'species'. There is also evidence that users are discovering non-virtual wildlife while playing Pokémon Go, leading to the Twitter hashtag #Pokeblitz that helps people identify 'real' species found and photographed during play.

Pokémon Go, the researchers write, exposes users first hand to basic natural history concepts such as species' habitat preferences and variations in abundance. 'Grass Pokémon', for example, tend to appear in parks, while water-related types are more likely to be found close to bodies of water. There are also four regional species that are continent restricted: Tauros to the Americas, Mr Mime to Western Europe, Farfetch’d to Asia, and the marsupial-like Kangaskhan to Australasia. This differentiation captures a fundamental aspect of natural history observation – that exploring new habitats and continents will lead to encounters with different species.

And hundreds of people congregated near New York’s Central Park one night over the summer to try to find a rare Vaporeon – something that will sound familiar to birdwatchers used to similar gatherings to see a rare species.

However, the researchers caution that the success of Pokémon Go could also bring challenges: for example, it may be that this type of augmented reality – featuring engaging, brightly coloured fictional creatures – could replace people's desire to interact with real-world nature, or the focus on catching and battling Pokémon may encourage exploitation of wildlife. There has also been controversy in the Netherlands, where Pokémon Go players have been blamed for damage caused to a protected dune system south of The Hague.

Co-author Dr Chris Sandbrook, a senior lecturer at UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Centre and affiliated lecturer at the Department of Geography, ��Ī, said: "Just getting people outside does not guarantee a conservation success from Pokémon Go. It might actually make things worse – for example, if interest in finding a rare Vaporeon replaces concern for real species threatened with extinction. Real nature could be seen as just a mundane backdrop for more exciting virtual wildlife."

Dorward added: "One of the positive things about Pokémon Go is that there's a very low barrier for entry. As long as you have a smartphone, you can play – and the game itself does a lot of things for you. Finding ways to break down barriers to engagement with real-life nature is a priority for conservation. Pokémon are also relatable 'characters', whereas modern conservation tends to frame itself purely in scientific terms, which may be off-putting to many.

"There is something called the biophilia hypothesis, which suggests that people have an in-built affinity with nature and a desire to explore the natural world. If that’s one of the reasons Pokémon Go has proved to be so popular – because it’s a natural history proxy – then that could be a huge boost to conservation. It's possible that the desire to connect with nature is there and to get people to engage with conservation we just need to 'sell' it correctly."

The paper 'Pokémon Go: benefits, costs, and lessons for the conservation movement' is published in the journal Conservation Letters.

The augmented reality game, designed for mobile devices, allows users to capture, battle and train virtual creatures called Pokémon that appear on screen as if part of the real-world environment. But can the game's enormous success deliver any lessons to the fields of natural history and conservation?

The basic facts and information about Pokémon Go make it sound like an incredibly successful citizen science project, rather than a smartphone game

Leejiah Dorward

Mister_Toodles

Pokemon outside King's College ��Ī

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��Ī app maps decline in regional diversity of English dialects

sjr81 — Thu, 26 May 2016 09:26:27 +0000

The English Dialects App (free for Android and iOS) was launched in January 2016 and has been downloaded more than 70,000 times. To date, more than 30,000 people from over 4,000 locations around the UK have provided results on how certain words and colloquialisms are pronounced. A new, updated version of the app – which attempts to guess where you’re from at the end of the quiz – is available for download from this week.

Based on the huge new dataset of results, researchers at ��Ī, along with colleagues at the universities of Bern and Zurich, have been able to map the spread, evolution or decline of certain words and colloquialisms compared to results from the original survey of dialect speakers in 313 localities carried out in the 1950s.

One of the major findings is that some features of regional accents, such as pronouncing the 'r' in words like 'arm' – a very noticeable pronunciation feature which was once normal throughout the West Country and along much of the south coast – are disappearing in favour of the pronunciations found in London and the South-East (see map slideshow).

Lead researcher Dr Adrian Leemann, from ��Ī’s Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, said: “When it comes to language change in England, our results confirm that there is a clear pattern of levelling towards the English of the south-east; more and more people are using and pronouncing words in the way that people from London and the south-east do.

Professor David Britain from the University of Bern added: “People in Bristol speak much more similarly to those in Colchester now than they did fifty years ago. Regional differences are disappearing, some quite quickly. However, while many pockets of resistance to this levelling are shrinking, there is still a stark north-south divide in the pronunciation of certain key words.”

Dialect words are even more likely to have disappeared than regional accents, according to this research. Once, the word ‘backend’ instead of ‘autumn’ was common in much of England, but today very few people report using this word (see map slideshow).

However, the research has shown some areas of resistance to the patterns of overall levelling in dialect. Newcastle and Sunderland stood out from the rest of England with the majority of people from those areas continuing to use local words and pronunciations which are declining elsewhere. For example, many people in the North-East still use a traditional dialect word for 'a small piece of wood stuck under the skin', 'spelk' instead of Standard English 'splinter'.

Other dialect words, like ‘shiver’ for ‘splinter’, are still reported in exactly the same area they were found historically—although they are far less common than they once were (see map slideshow).

The data collected to date shows that one northern pronunciation has proved especially robust: saying words like 'last' with a short vowel instead of a long one. In this case, the northern form actually appears to have spread southwards in the Midlands and the West Country compared with the historical survey.

In other cases, new pronunciations were found to be spreading. Pronouncing words like 'three' with an 'f' was only found in a tiny region in the south east in the 1950s, but the data from today show this pronunciation is much more widespread – 15% of respondents reported saying 'free' for 'three', up from just 2% in the old Atlas.

��Ī PhD student Tam Blaxter, who worked alongside Dr Leemann to map the 30,000 responses supplied by the public, suggests that greater geographical mobility is behind the changes when compared to the first systematic nationwide investigation of regional speech, the Survey of English Dialects from the 1950s.

“There has been much greater geographical mobility in the last half century,” said Blaxter. “Many people move around much more for education, work and lifestyle and there has been a significant shift of population out of the cities and into the countryside.

“Many of the results have confirmed what language experts might predict – but until now we just didn’t have the geographical breadth of data to back up our predictions. If we were to do the survey in another 60-70 years we might well see this dialect levelling expanding further, although some places like the north-east seem to have been especially good at preserving certain colloquialisms and pronunciations.”

When the app was originally launched in January, users were quizzed about the way they spoke 26 different words or phrases. The academics behind the app wanted to see how English dialects have changed, spread or levelled out since the Survey of English Dialects. The 1950s project took eleven years to complete and captured the accents and dialects of mainly farm labourers.

Perhaps one of the most surprising results of the data provided so far is how the use of ‘scone’ (to rhyme with ‘gone’ rather than ‘cone’) is much more common in the north of England that many might imagine (see map slideshow).

Adrian Leemann said: “Everyone has strong views about how this word is pronounced but until we launched the app in January, we knew rather little about who uses which pronunciation and where. Our data shows that for the North and Scotland, ‘scone’ rhymes with ‘gone’, for Cornwall and the area around Sheffield it rhymes with ‘cone’ – while for the rest of England, there seems to be a lot of community-internal variation. In the future we will further unpick how this distribution is conditioned socially.”

The launch of the English Dialects App in January has also allowed language use in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland to be compared with language use in England (the original 1950s survey was limited to England and similar surveys of the other parts of the UK were not undertaken at the same time or using the same methods).

The huge levels of feedback have also meant the team have improved the prediction of where users might be from. The app now correctly places 25 per cent of respondents within 20 miles, compared with 37 miles for the old method.

Regional diversity in dialect words and pronunciations could be diminishing as much of England falls more in line with how English is spoken in London and the south-east, according to the first results from a free app developed by ��Ī researchers.

More and more people are using and pronouncing words in the way that people from London and the south-east do.

Adrian Leemann

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Yes

Phone for a doctor

cjb250 — Wed, 28 Oct 2015 12:29:19 +0000

It’s the middle of the afternoon. You hear the trill of an incoming text message on your phone. You pick it up, expecting it to be from a friend.

Skipping breakfast will make you overeat at lunch.

Ah yes, this must be from Professor Ambady Ramachandran. You’ve never met him and he doesn’t know you personally, but he has sent you this helpful reminder because you are one of over 20 million Indians at a high risk of developing type 2 diabetes. Tomorrow, you tell yourself, you will make sure you eat before going to work.

“It seems paradoxical that something as simple as text messaging could help prevent you from developing diabetes,” says Professor Nick Wareham, Director of the Medical Research Council (MRC) Epidemiology Unit at the ��Ī. And yet, the evidence suggests it might work.

In 2013, Ramachandran, who founded and runs a diabetes hospital in Chennai, India, and is President of the India Diabetes Research Foundation, reported the results of a study that found almost a third fewer men in the high risk group went on to develop diabetes if they received between two and four texts a week giving advice on diet and exercise.

“This is a big – and surprising – effect,” says Wareham. And India, as with many other countries worldwide, needs something big (and, possibly, surprising) to help it tackle the growing burden of diabetes and obesity. Recent estimates suggest there are 68 million people living with diabetes in India, the majority with type 2 diabetes. A mixture of poor diet and lack of exercise, low birth weight followed by rapid growth, and genetic predisposition – Indians tend to develop diabetes at a lower body-mass index than Caucasians – means that diabetes is twice as common in India as it is in the UK.

While targeted strategies aimed at high risk individuals are likely to be effective, there is no way they could be rolled out to 20 million people, says Wareham. “If you had to individually counsel that many people, it would be unaffordable. Simple, pragmatic, scalable approaches are the only ones that are feasible.”

Ramachandran’s study involved a relatively small sample, but such was its promise that he and Wareham have teamed up to see whether text messaging might be scaled up to a larger population, with support from the MRC and the Indian Council for Medical Research. An additional arm of the study, being carried out by Imperial College London, is looking at whether the same concept would work in the UK.

Wareham and colleagues use a combination of a risk score that they have developed, which looks at factors such as age, sex and weight, and a simple blood test to identify people at risk of developing diabetes: these are the individuals who are targeted by the text messages.

It is the pervasiveness of mobile phones that could make this scheme work: there are almost a billion mobile phones in India – the country ranks second only to China. Smartphones are still much less common, with just around one in six people in the country owning one, but this is expected to increase significantly, potentially making India the second largest market worldwide.

If, as expected, smartphones really do take off, they could hold the answer to helping those people unfortunate enough to develop diabetes to monitor their condition, says Chris Lowe, Emeritus Professor of Biotechnology at the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology in ��Ī.

“We’re interested in developing diagnostics that are appropriate for taking measurements at home or in the doctor’s surgery, without the need for a specialist,” says Lowe. For over a decade, he has been looking at making ‘smart’ holograms that are sensitive to chemicals or biological compounds.

Unlike conventional holograms, which are two-dimensional, Lowe’s holograms are three-dimensional, created by shining a one-nanosecond laser pulse into a gel, suspended in which are silver nanoparticles. The silver nanoparticles arrange themselves into planes, giving the hologram a particular colour. But when glucose – from a blood or urine sample – comes into contact with the hologram, it binds to sensors within the gel, known as receptors, causing the hologram to expand or contract; the planes move closer together or further apart and the light given off by the hologram changes colour, moving towards the blue or red end of the spectrum.

“You can see these changes visually, but to increase the accuracy you need to be able to quantify the change, and this is where smartphones come in,” he says. Using the phone’s camera and a downloadable app, it could be possible to give an accurate measurement of the level of glucose in the body. His colleague Dr Gita Khalili Moghaddam is working on software that would enable the app to operate in a real-world setting, compensating for variability between phones and the environment.

The technology works in a similar way to QR codes – the black-and-white square patterns which, when scanned on a phone, redirect you to information online. In fact, says Moghaddam, the holograms could themselves be QR codes. “You can save the patient’s information in the holographic QR code, so when you scan it and send off your glucose levels, embedded in this are your own details,” she says.

Lowe and colleagues are exploring ways of delivering the holograms, from strips of holograms through to contact lenses that measure glucose in tear fluid as a surrogate for blood sugar levels, and even to having holograms that can be tattooed onto skin. These could even do away with the need to take regular blood finger-prick tests.

Despite the hi-tech nature of this technology, part of its beauty lies in its cost. The holograms could be mass-produced at a very low cost – even if they were embedded into daily-use contact lenses, the cost would be negligible, making them particularly attractive in the developing world. At the moment, patients need special instruments to monitor their glucose levels – in areas such as rural India, these are often given away, but their cost then has to be incorporated into the disposable strips used by the instruments.

“With smart holograms, there is no instrument,” says Lowe. “It’s just your smartphone. And soon, almost everyone will have one of those.”

Worried you might be at risk from diabetes? Check your phone: it might help stop you getting the disease. And if you already have diabetes? Your phone might even help you monitor your condition at home.

With smart holograms, there is no instrument. It’s just your smartphone. And soon, almost everyone will have one of those

Chris Lowe

James Theophane

mobile-mobile

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Mood-tracking app paves way for pocket therapy

tdk25 — Wed, 08 May 2013 04:00:42 +0000

A smartphone app that tracks people’s feelings and works out what might be triggering peaks in their mood, using the data invisibly captured by their phones, has been developed by researchers.

The free app, called “Emotion Sense” has just been launched and is available for Android. It takes advantage of the fact that smartphones are increasingly capable of collecting information about where we are, how noisy our environment is, how much we are moving around, and who we communicate with.

Unlike other, similar, research projects, Emotion Sense then combines systematically-gathered data from a wide range of sensors with the user’s own report about their mood, which is entered through a system designed by psychologists. First, the user is asked to mark how they feel using an on-screen matrix called an “emotion grid”. Based on their response, the phone then conducts a brief survey, to clarify their emotional state.

By cross-referring both sets of data, the app’s designers hope that it will accumulate a very precise record of what drives people’s emotional peaks, showing, for example, when they are likely to be at their most stressed, or when they feel most relaxed. This could prove particularly valuable for helping people who need specialist psychological support.

Emotion Sense is also a live research project. The ��Ī-led team behind it previously carried out lab-based investigations in which participants were asked to record their feelings in a diary. The new system allows them to gather data about both the drivers of people’s moods, and how far smartphones can record this, in a “real world” setting.

Dr Neal Lathia, a research associate in the University’s Computer Laboratory, explained: “Behind the scenes, smartphones are constantly collecting data that can turn them into a key medical and psychological tool. Any smartphone now comes with numerous sensors that can tell you about aspects of your life, like how active you are, or how sociable you have been in the past 24 hours. In the long term, we hope to be able to extract that data so that, for example, it can be used for therapeutic purposes.”

The app was created as part of a wider project, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, called “Ubiquitous and Social Computing for Positive Behaviour Change” (or “UBhave”). Its overall aim is to see how far mobile phones can be used to monitor people’s behaviour and, where appropriate, change it for the better to improve their health and well-being.

“Most people who see a therapist may only have an appointment once every fortnight,” Dr Cecilia Mascolo, a reader in mobile systems at the ��Ī Computer Lab said. “Many, however, keep their phones with them most of the time. In terms of sheer presence, mobiles can provide an ongoing link with a person.”

Researchers have long been interested in the potential of mobile phones to monitor people’s behaviour. By combining the data from the GPS, accelerometer, and microphone with a log of the user’s calling and texting patterns, a study of a person’s smartphone can offer a very useful record of their habits, activities and routines.

Previous research by the Emotion Sense team focused on the potential of the microphone, tracking users’ conversations to work out how they were feeling. The research now seeks to exploit a wider range of sensors, combined with self-reporting from the user themselves, who can input data about how they feel.

When Emotion Sense is opened for the first time, only one sensor is “unlocked”. The app spends roughly a week collecting data from this sensor and testing it against the user’s emotional state. At the end of this, the user is asked to complete a short life-satisfaction survey, which unlocks a new sensor. After about eight weeks, a full range of sensors has been tested. This systematic approach provides the researchers with valuable data for study, but it is also designed as a “journey of discovery” for the user, giving them a step-by-step insight into what might be influencing their own mood swings.

Mood itself is registered through a system designed by psychologists within the research team. At different times of the day, the app sends the user a notification, rather like receiving a text message, asking them about their mood. These can be set to pop up on the phone as little as twice a day, and assess the user’s mood using a custom-designed “emotion grid”, followed by a survey.

The grid has two axes, one stretching from “negative” to “positive” feelings, and one from “active” to “inactive”. Using their touchscreen, the user simply chooses the point on the grid that reflects how positive and active they feel. For example, a point close to the top right indicates high positivity and activity, suggesting that they feel energised or excited.

Uniquely, this general overview is then refined by a short survey, which asks the user to clarify exactly how they feel. The entire process takes about two minutes to complete.

“Most other attempts at software like this are coarse-grained in terms of their view of what a feeling is,” Dr Jason Rentfrow, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychology at the ��Ī, said. “Many just look at emotion in terms of feeling happy, sad, angry or neutral. The aim here is to use a more flexible approach, to collect data that shows how moods vary between people . That is something which we think is quite unique to the system we have designed.”

The code which is used in Emotion Sense to collect sensor data from people’s phones is also being made available on an open-source basis so that other researchers can conduct their own experiments. It can be found at http://emotionsense.org/code.html. For information about the app in general, visit: http://emotionsense.org

For more information about this story, please contact: Tom Kirk, Office of Communications, ��Ī. Tel: 01223 332300; Mob: 07764 161923; Email: thomas.kirk@admin.cam.ac.uk

An Android app which keeps tabs on users’ mood swings and works out what might be causing them has been developed by researchers, with implications for psychological therapy and improving well-being.

Behind the scenes, smartphones are constantly collecting data that can turn them into a key medical and psychological tool.

Neal Lathia

Neal Lathia, ��Ī Computer Lab

The Emotion Sense app asks users to record their feelings on a chart designed by psychologists, then surveys them further to assess their mood accurately. This is cross-referred with data about their behaviour, picked up by sensors within the phone itself

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Yes

Can your phone double up as your life-coach?

fpjl2 — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 08:00:01 +0000

On January 1^st, millions of people will wake up with their sore heads full of New Year resolutions to achieve more fulfilling, less stressful lives. Now, researchers are developing a data-gathering mobile platform to help identify the causes of stress for individuals and encourage people to build healthier, happier lifestyles - something that could become a preventative measure for a huge number of medical conditions.

Between use of a phone’s inbuilt sensors and monitoring from local sources, the Android Remote Sensing app, or AIRS, can gather a huge amount of data - from environmental aspects such as location, weather, noise levels, even vicinity devices to gauge crowds, to social aspects such as calendar events and communication spikes in email, text and calls - providing a startlingly informed account of a person’s day.

This automatic recording is coupled with the ability to add emotional data by updating your mood through a series of emoticons, along with text annotations. ECG or heart rate sensors can also be used to show physiological reactions.

All this feeds into a person’s unique life “narrative” to determine what the researchers describe as “meaningful events” - those combinations which trigger stress and strong emotion.

“By steering people to become self-aware of stress and activity management, systems such as AIRS may be able to help people before they develop health problems in later life, when costly treatments are required with limited success,” said Dr Dirk Trossen, technical manager of the project at ��Ī’s Computer Laboratory.

“The time before prescribed medicine is critical in prevention and cutting costs for health services. This requires close monitoring and awareness of lifestyle on the part of individuals - so if the ubiquitous phone in your pocket can also assist with better living in general it’s a win/win situation.”

AIRS provides essential input for the desktop-based MyRoR platform for lifestyle management, developed by Dana Pavel from the University of Essex’s School of Computer Science, as part of the wider PAL project. The project - funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and the Technology Strategy Board - is investigating personal and social communication services for health and lifestyle monitoring.

The MyRoR platform correlates this information and delivers it as an easy to digest blog-style timeline, allowing the user to detect spikes in various activities and surroundings - and their relation to the diarised emotional values and physiological symptoms of stress.

The outputs from Pavel’s MyRoR platform are sets of sharable graphics that provide a user-friendly entry into the complex data, offering the “essence” of the individual’s day or week. “The graphics, or media objects, that present the visual story are a more natural way of representing the dense information, bringing it all together in a fun, concise and engaging way,” said Dana Pavel, from Essex’s School of Computer Science. “These stories allow users to hone in on what’s important, the situations with most meaning.”

Users can then employ the AIRS app to craft lifestyle approaches that help flatten stress levels - such as automatic settings that suspend email and calls at key points to create pockets of calm in the day - which can continue beyond initial physical monitoring to support a more balanced life.

There have been a number of user tests - with both ECG monitoring and just the smartphone app - and feedback from users has been positive. “The platform gives people the opportunity to step outside their lives and analyse in-depth contextual data from their day to day existence - an important chance for serious reflection on aspects of daily life that are impacting perhaps without even realising,” said Trossen.

Importantly for the researchers, given the personal nature of the data, information security and software transparency have been paramount. All personal data is stored locally, and is wiped if a phone is stolen and unlocked, and the app has been made ‘open source’ - with all hard coding accessible - and freely available through Google Play.

“This kind of assisted living though mobile technologies is in its infancy, but it is essential that solutions adapt to people, not the other way around, said Trossen.

“Systems should enhance lives and help involve individuals in the information that is having an impact on them every minute.”

For more information, please contact Dirk Trossen on dt355@cam.ac.uk

Researchers are developing a smartphone platform that enables careful monitoring of lifestyle to pinpoint and help avert triggers for stress and negative emotion.

If the ubiquitous phone in your pocket can also assist with better living in general it’s a win/win situation.

Dirk Trossen

AIRS widgets on the Android home screen

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Yes

Your chance to ‘scream in space’ using smartphone technology

fpjl2 — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 13:04:33 +0000

It was Ridley Scott’s film Alien that gave us the now legendary tagline: In space no one can hear you scream. Now, a ��Ī student society will use the technology in your pocket to find out if this is really the case.

��Ī University Spaceflight (CUSF) will be uploading videos of people screaming into a specially developed smartphone app, housed on a Google Android phone that will be shot into space as part of a satellite payload in early December. Once in orbit, the phone will play the screams at full volume, while at the same time recording audio.

The phone will then relay back to Earth pictures of each ‘scream’ video playing against the spectacular view from the phone's inbuilt camera, along with a sound file that may or may not contain the scream captured in the vacuum of space, although the members of CUSF are not holding their collective breath.

“Obviously, we’re not expecting to get much back, there may be some buzzing, but this is more about getting young people interested in satellites and acoustics, perhaps encouraging them to consider future study in science or engineering” said Edward Cunningham, a physics undergraduate at Churchill College and one of the members of CUSF.

With this in mind, the team are asking members of the public to submit their own screams for galactic transmission - by uploading a short ‘scream’ video to YouTube, and submitting their entry.

Each video must be at most ten seconds long, and there will be ten winning screams which can be voted for by the public on the project’s website. Screams must be entered before midnight on Sunday 4th November, after which the winning videos will be announced and loaded onto the phone in readiness for a launch before the end of this year.

The ‘scream in space’ app is one of four phone apps that will be on board STRaND-1 - a smartphone nanosatellite - built by a team from Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd and the University of Surrey’s Space Centre. During the summer of 2011, the STRaND (Surrey Training Research and Nanosatellite Demonstration) team ran a Facebook competition to find apps to go into orbit - and CUSF’s screaming app was one of the winners.

“We came across the competition and wanted to enter, which got us thinking about what smartphones have that a standard satellite doesn’t,” said Cunningham. “Smartphones have got a speaker and a microphone, so we wanted to do something engaging with these functions.”

The STRaND-1 project will be testing the capabilities of a smartphone to control a satellite in space. The phone will run on Android's open-source operating system. A computer, built at the Surrey Space Centre, will test the vital statistics of the phone once in space. When all the tests are complete, the plan is to switch off the micro-computer and the smartphone will be used to operate parts of the satellite. At its lowest, the phone will orbit 400km above the Earth, roughly the same as the International Space Station.

"Modern smartphones are pretty amazing," said Shaun Kenyon, the project manager at Surrey Satellite Technology. “We want to see if the phone works up there, and if it does, we want to see if the phone can control a satellite."

Using smartphone technology to control space hardware is something that CUSF themselves continue to explore. The student society has already sent several Android smartphones into the stratosphere as flight computers for high altitude balloon launches, building custom apps to navigate.

“This project reflects the gradual shift of the space sector out of the exclusive domain of governments with multi-billion budgets, and into the hands of smaller ventures,” said Cunningham. “With the Android phone, you benefit from the extensive development carried out in the consumer context, and for almost no money at all. It's no coincidence that NASA has a PhoneSat project of their own.”

CUSF have previously shown that an Android phone works successfully as a standalone flight computer at a similar altitude to the one Felix Baumgartner recently performed his skydive from, but the opportunity to produce an app to run on the first smartphone in orbit is one CUSF members are thrilled about:

“The principle of using a low-cost consumer device to do something high tech and new on a shoestring budget is something we really endorse. We often use readily available materials in our own projects,” said Cunningham.

“STRaND-1 is doing something that has never been done before and something you definitely can’t do every day. We see the project as a great opportunity to promote interest in space and also have some fun!”

For more information, contact Fred Lewsey (fred.lewsey@admin.cam.ac.uk) at the ��Ī Office of External Affairs and Communications.

��Ī students will be loading human screams onto a smartphone that will be blasted into outer space later this year. The public are invited to submit their screams, which will be emitted while in orbit at the same time as the phone records - to test if it’s possible to capture the sound of screaming in space.

It's no coincidence that NASA has a PhoneSat project of their own.

Edward Cunningham

CUSF

Image taken in stratosphere using Android phone, from previous CUSF project ‘Squirrel 3’ which used smartphone to pilot high-altitude balloon

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Yes

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