Research Associate/Senior Research Associate in Human-AI Healthcare Technology Co-Design at University of Bristol

The role

This is an exciting opportunity for a Research Associate (RA) / Senior Research Associate (SRA) to join EPSRC TORUS, an interdisciplinary digital health project working with a range of academics, clinicians, patients and carers to co-design a sensor-based machine-learning enhanced smart-home system to support clinical trials of new medications.

The RA/SRA will join the human-computer interaction team working between Newcastle University and University of Bristol on contributions to co-design, interaction design, responsible innovation and understanding how different stakeholders engage in a human-centred approach to AI for health and care.   

What will you be doing?

Using the previous EPSRC SPHERE smart home system as a toolkit and collaborating with a range of researchers on the TORUS project, a useful, usable and acceptable system will be co-designed with stakeholders so that it can be used in homes to contribute to randomised control trials of Parkinson’s drugs. 

This post will employ ethnographic, participatory, and pragmatic evaluation approaches to get closer to understanding what it would be like for people with chronic conditions and clinicians to capture, monitor, and use health data to understand the impact of medications on the real-world lived experience of Parkinson’s.

Beyond the development and user testing of these smart home systems, this work will also contribute new knowledge to the growing body of literature in the human-computer interaction and medical informatics domain on co-design and evaluations of AI and ML enhanced healthcare technologies.

You should apply if

You are interested in collaborating with interaction design and human-compute interaction experts and in:

• Collaboratively leading the co-design activity of TORUS with collaborators from Newcastle as well as across the TORUS team.
• Designing, planning, recruiting and and executing research studies.
• Collecting data in video and audio form and systematically analysing it using methods such as Interaction Analysis and thematic analysis. Other data collection methods and approaches might also be used, such as grounded theory and observations in the field.
• Translating the collected data into implications for the design of the sensor system and for the data fusion, and working closely with engineering colleagues to translate these findings into design requirements.
• Writing up and submitting research findings to top tier HCI and digital health publication venues.

Additional information

Please contact Professor Kenton O’Hara to ask about the role or if there are any other queries (cskpaoh@bristol.ac.uk).

To find out more about what it’s like to work in the Faculty of Engineering, and how the Faculty supports people to achieve their potential, please see our staff blog:

https://engineeringincludesme.blogs.bristol.ac.uk/

Interviews are anticipated to take place on 25th September 2023.

Our strategy and mission

We recently launched our strategy to 2030 tying together our mission, vision and values.

The University of Bristol aims to be a place where everyone feels able to be themselves and do their best in an inclusive working environment where all colleagues can thrive and reach their full potential. We want to attract, develop, and retain individuals with different experiences, backgrounds and perspectives – particularly people of colour, LGBT+ and disabled people – because diversity of people and ideas remains integral to our excellence as a global civic institution.