We welcome the AHRC's identification of Design as a strategic priority. The Art and Design research centre at Sheffield Hallam University has a rich tradition of design research and practice spanning over 20 years. Over the last 5 years this expertise has been brought to bear on the complex and hitherto untapped potential of design in Health and social care. This critical mass of work has been centred around two specific collaborations within the research centre. Firstly Lab4Living, which is a partnership between researchers in health and design, between practitioners and designers and, most importantly between individuals who use products and services and the designers of these (www.lab4living.org.uk). Secondly the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) funded User-centred Healthcare Design (UCHD). UCHD is another multidisciplinary project specifically exploring the use of design theory and practice in healthcare (www.uchd.org.uk). These collaborations have resulted in the International Design4Health conference being held in 2011 and 2013 (http://www.design4health.org.uk/) This conference and associated activities have provided an excellent focus for the discussion around the translation of design research into healthcare and have linked business, university and third sectors around a bewildering array of projects. The conversations around the key challenges for this area of design have started in this forum, but the AHRC funding would allow a literature review and a series of seminars to explore the key themes identified at the close of the last conference, namely: Languages of evaluation across design and health projects How to articulate Design's unique contribution to the field of healthcare innovation The range of modes of engagement with health care that designers can have The first stage of the proposed project would be to commission a comprehensive literature review to determine the range and amount of activity already underway in the UK and internationally in design for health. This would provide a sound evidence base for the second phase of the work. The conference steering committee already has excellent representation from across the UK design academic landscape, who alongside those with experience of Healthcare and Health research, would be able to start to frame and then answer the questions, and ground the answers in the practical experience of delivering projects. The latter part of the project will translate the outputs of the literature review and workshops into an engaging digital form of dissemination All of these activities will have a natural outlet in the Design4Health conference 2015.

The 'oldest old' are the fastest growing age group in the UK and a grand societal challenge we face is that the nature of growing older and end of life is changing. There are distinct challenges that are pushing some existing systems to breaking point (e.g. there is an increasing demand for care, but there are reductions in resources available to support the older old and worryingly a reduction in people using local authority care services which is suggestive of exclusion). We position this research within the fourth age; a period of life clinically characterised by physical and cognitive frailty and decline towards death. People in this period of life are seldom included in research, but have a unique voice around critical societal challenges and could be sensitively and meaningfully included into research in order to give them a voice in the reimagining of digital media to support sense of self for the older old. Further this research will engage with carers and those bereaved to investigate how new media could support people's relationships and sense of self not only at end of life but also in bereavement. We are living in a new digital age, each gathering a digital trail of media and personal data as we live: photographs, videos, blog posts, forum comments, Facebook conversations, tweets, music preferences etc. Whether these are created by us or by others about us there is a vast and rich wealth of digital media that could be leveraged and reappropriated to reflect positive things back to us in new ways - about ourselves and our connectedness with others. The concept of ongoingness is something we see as valuable for the development of new tools and systems for the configuration of metadata in new ways. Ongoingness suggests that all stages of our lives are connected and continuing, which gives us ways to think about what digital media creation and consumption practices could be that draw on the repository of media connected to us in challenging contexts. It also gives us the ability to consider how digital technologies could be developed in acknowledgement that people need to maintain a form of connectedness to a dead loved one in bereavement. Beyond memorialisation people benefit from practices that nurture an ongoing (albeit different) relationship with the deceased after a loved one has died. To date there is a lack of research considering technology for these contexts and what we can't do currently is curate this vast resource of media to specifically support sense of self, help people deal with their own approaching end of life, nor help others deal with bereavement of a loved one through using these digital assets in purposeful ways. Through links via our partners from Alzheimer's Society, Cruse, NCPC, HospiceUK, Dementia Positive, Marie Curie and Dementia Care we will work with older old people, carers and the bereaved using a research through design methodology to gently use acts of making and reflecting through objects to firstly develop new ways of using our metadata, secondly develop and deploy Internet of Things high fidelity prototypes that enable creation and curation of this digital media in new ways and thirdly develop new visions of consumption that foreground ongoingness. To give an example of what this could mean in the context of anticipating death - through their lives Betty and Derrick always used to jokingly argue with each other as to which song was better The Beatles 'Blackbird' or 'Dear Prudence'. Derrick curates their media so that after his death when Betty selects 'Blackbird', the song 'Dear Prudence' will always be played straight afterwards because he knows that it will make Betty smile. The couple loved gardening, now every May Betty unfolds her e-paper and a compilation of podcasts featuring specific flowers from the current year's Chelsea Flower Show are sent to Betty and a matching bouquet is delivered to her with anecdotes from Derrick's blog of how he grew some of these plants.

Humans are highly adaptable, and speech is our natural medium for informal communication. When communicating, we continuously adjust to other people, to the situation, and to the environment, using previously acquired knowledge to make this adaptation seem almost instantaneous. Humans generalise, enabling efficient communication in unfamiliar situations and rapid adaptation to new speakers or listeners. Current speech technology works well for certain controlled tasks and domains, but is far from natural, a consequence of its limited ability to acquire knowledge about people or situations, to adapt, and to generalise. This accounts for the uneasy public reaction to speech-driven systems. For example, text-to-speech synthesis can be as intelligible as human speech, but lacks expression and is not perceived as natural. Similarly, the accuracy of speech recognition systems can collapse if the acoustic environment or task domain changes, conditions which a human listener would handle easily. Research approaches to these problems have hitherto been piecemeal and as a result progress has been patchy. In contrast NST will focus on the integrated theoretical development of new joint models for speech recognition and synthesis. These models will allow us to incorporate knowledge about the speakers, the environment, the communication context and awareness of the task, and will learn and adapt from real world data in an online, unsupervised manner. This theoretical unification is already underway within the NST labs and, combined with our record of turning theory into practical state-of-the-art applications, will enable us to bring a naturalness to speech technology that is not currently attainable.The NST programme will yield technology which (1) approaches human adaptability to new communication situations, (2) is capable of personalised communication, and (3) takes account of speaker intention and expressiveness in speech recognition and synthesis. This is an ambitious vision. Its success will be measured in terms of how the theoretical development reshapes the field over the next decade, the takeup of the software systems that we shall develop, and through the impact of our exemplar interactive applications.We shall establish a strong User Group to maximise the impact of the project, with a members concerned with clinical applications, as well as more general speech technology. Members of the User Group include Toshiba, EADS Innovation Works, Cisco, Barnsley Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, and the Euan MacDonald Centre for MND Research. An important interaction with the User Group will be validating our systems on their data and tasks, discussed at an annual user workshop.

The Bionics+ NetworkPlus will represent the spectrum of research, clinical and industrial communities across bionic technologies within the EPSRC Grand Challenge theme of Frontiers of Physical Intervention. It will invigorate and support a cohesive, open and active network with the mission of creating a mutually supportive environment. It will lead to the co-creation of user-centred bionic solutions that are fit for purpose. These advances will have a global impact, consolidating the world-leading position of the UK. The founding tranche will focus on ambitious and transformative research, new collaborative and translational activities, and the formulation of a longer-term strategy. Within this context, as a community, we will explore and identify areas of opportunity and value, driven by Bionics users' needs, complementary to existing activity and strengths. The network will instigate and support early-stage research in these priority areas, alongside providing an outward-facing representation and engagement of the UK Bionics community. Further, we aim to contribute in an advisory capacity to public bodies, UK industry and government policy. At the time of the application, we have obtained a positive commitment from circa 70 groups including bionic users, academic partners from universities in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and a few international partners; partners in medical devices, orthotics and prosthetics industry, both large corporates and small-medium size companies; and many clinicians, surgeons and aligned health experts from relevant NHS clinics and the private sector.