Utilising wearable and environmental sensors to identify the context of gait performance in the home

In this paper we describe our work on the development of a multi-sensory deployment within the homes of elderly people prone to falling. The aim of our work is to provide both preventative guidance with regards to environmental hazards, as well as to create rich information context around gait performance, near-falls or falls that do happen so the cause can be diagnosed more thoroughly. We use a gait analysis platform developed at the TRIL Centre, coupled with a SenseCam wearable camera, to identify the activities and the location in the home during walking activities. In addition to this, and to add even more context, we use home energy- monitoring to enhance our understanding of activities and activity patterns in the home. This method could support older people in identifying a key problem and allow the participant to modify their behaviour or environment to limit or prevent future occurrences

Enabling Premixed Hydrogen-Air Combustion for Aeroengines via Laboratory Experiment Modeling

All combustion systems from large scale power plants to the engines of cars to gas turbines in aircraft are looking for new fuel sources. Recently, clean energy for aviation has come into the foreground as an important issue due to the environment impacts of current combustion methods and fuels used. The aircraft industry is looking towards hydrogen as a new, powerful, and clean fuel of the future. However there are several engineering and scientific challenges to overcome before hydrogen can be deployed into the industry. These issuesrange from storing the hydrogen in a viable cryogenic form for an aircraft to stably burning the hydrogen in different phases during flight. Since a fundamental aspect, the fuel source (usually kerosene), is being switched to hydrogen, extensive modeling and ground testing of a future engine is required before a gas turbine engine can be retrofitted to work with hydrogen or built from the ground up. Modeling and simulating turbofan engine components can complement the engineering design process by allowing designs to be tested before beingimplemented into an actual turbofan engine. This allows an engineer to build confidence around a given design. Actual testing of gas turbine engines and their turbomachinery components is expensive and modeling these devices can help mitigate some of the cost and reduce potentially fatal errors in the design of the engine. In this thesis, several models are developed that allow for the study of hydrogen in a laboratory environment, and are compared to past works, industry software and data. This includes a 0D turbofan engine model and computational fluid dynamics simulations of a laboratory scale burner. The results formed in this work establish that the initial design of the burner and codes developedhere can serve as a foundation for future experiments and aid in the pursuit of achieving agas turbine engine operating with hydrogen-air mixtures

Looking back at genomic medicine in 2011

Genomic medicine, in its broadest sense of being medical developments informed by ‘omic ’ advances, has continued to move towards the clinic in 2011. To mark the end of the year and the beginning of 2012, the editors of the six sections within Genome Medicine were invited to provide their highlights of the past year and to hint at the developments that we are likely to see in the near future. Six different areas of progress are covered here, but the core of genomic medicine continues to be intrinsically linked to improvements in the underlying technology, and two obvious examples are sequencing and mass spectrometry. Technological advances have enabled larger studies and more complex analyses, allowing researchers and clinicians to track changes within a single cell and yet spot patterns across a whole population an