The 'Art at the Start' project has been offering arts therapy and creative play sessions to promote the health and wellbeing of parents and 0-3 year old infants within Dundee Contemporary Arts gallery. During our project, we have managed to reach families who don't traditionally visit art galleries and have helped parents who have had difficulties bonding with their children to connect to together with them through shared art making. We have evidenced positive changes in the quality of family wellbeing via questionnaires, interviews and observations of family interactions which focus on the experience of the infant. Our project has been listed as an example of best public health practise and won several public engagement prizes. The proposed research scales up this successful approach, embedding four art therapists within four arts galleries across Scotland to explore whether the 'Art at the Start' model can be successfully repeated in different settings, widening access to arts spaces and supporting parents and infants across Scotland to build secure relationships. The NHS rely on community spaces to help them provide the first line of support for families with young children who are struggling with their wellbeing, but don't yet qualify for urgent clinical care. However, a special task force put together by the government to support parents and infants' mental health recognises that 'community' interventions need to be more sustainably resourced. In order to gain funding, services like ours need a strong evidence base. By bringing together researchers from psychology, arts and arts education, we hope to explore how we can both quantify and qualify the impact of our service; explaining how effective it is, how and where it works, and why. We will do this by gathering information on how people feel before and after engaging with our service, and by exploring which groups of people tend to visit the galleries before and after our out-reach programme. This is important, because access to arts is known to have a protective impact on health and wellbeing, but many marginalised groups in our community struggle to access cultural spaces. Although we have planned how to measure our outcomes, our research programme will also adapt as we go, taking into account the perspectives of gallery staff, local communities and NHS teams gathered in regular 'stakeholder' meetings. At the centre of this 'action research' approach is our art therapy team, who have been trained to reflexively adapt the service they provide depending on their clients' needs and local conditions. This will help us to learn how our service can be adapted to different cultural settings. Our ultimate aim is to showcase to the Scottish Government how we can use the power of the arts to provide a cost-effective solution for public health and wellbeing. Giving children the best start in life is important, because our parents teach us how to interact with others, and the love they provide is essential for us to develop academic and social competence. Poor starts in life can be passed down through generations, and the 'Art at the Start' model offers a way to break this cycle. Since both early relationships and access to the arts have been shown to have protective benefits for health and wellbeing, our intervention stands to have a long-term impact on the lives of the families we reach. To ensure that this powerful impact is heard by those who design and fund parent and infant mental health services, and by the cultural spaces which might host such interventions, we have planned a number of key outputs, including academic papers, a professional magazine article aimed at the gallery sector, and a policy paper summarising the project's outcomes to be presented in person and in writing to gallery, government and NHS teams. This will help us to show how arts and science perspectives can be brought together to present creative solutions to public health problems.

Older age groups are the fastest growing sector of the population because of the post-war baby boom population and increased life expectancy. Neurological changes are commonly observed in ageing populations including Alzheimer's Disease (AD) and other dementias. AD patients tend to become withdrawn and depressed due to communication problems and loss of confidence. However memory loss in people with AD occurs in reverse chronological order so that pockets of long-term memory remain accessible even as the disease progresses. AMPER's main technological challenge is the development of an agent with a novel human-like autobiographical memory model that tells stories to encourage reminiscing using individualised repositories of life experiences in real-world social contexts. AMPER will apply user-centred design with AD individuals and their carers to create such an agent. This will perform a carer-assisted intervention for personalised reminiscence, telling stories and bringing to the surface memories residing in the still viable regions of the brain. The project will collect both generationally relevant and personally relevant multi-media materials organised and reorganised by the agent's autobiographical memory. It will test the acceptability and effectiveness of both graphical and table-top robot agents. Autobiographical memory provides a reflection of "self" enabling an individual to relive an event. By building a technological bridge to unique life experiences and aiding recollection, an AD individual's sense of value, importance and belonging may be restored. The project aims to create a meaningful technology that is accessible as well as responsive to an individual's changing needs and experiences. The project will work with the charity Sporting Memories, already involved in reminiscence support, with the NHS Scotland Neuroprogressive and Dementia Network, the University of Edinburgh Centre for Dementia Prevention, and the Latin American Network for Dementia Research, forming its Steering Committee. Craig Ritchie, of the Centre for Dementia Prevention partner, will also bring in Scottish Dementia Research Consortium and Brain Health Scotland as Steering Committee members.

A major challenge facing the health and wellbeing of people with intellectual disabilities is the level of anxiety experienced by both the disabled patient and the dentist. When a patient with intellectual disabilities is anxious, they may become defensive and exhibit challenging behaviour when the dentist attempts to treat them. As a result of this, the procedure may have to either be abandoned or the patient sedated. The need for sedation is a common problem in dentistry as patients with intellectual disabilities often require a general anaesthetic for simple dental treatment. This carries increased risks, a longer recovery time and increases the cost of the procedure to the NHS. One reason for patients' anxiety is the difficulty in communication between patient and dentist. In particular, it can be difficult for dentists to provide patients with intellectual disabilities with information about the treatment they require in a way that they can understand. An inability to understand what is about to happen or to express feelings makes a visit to the dentist frightening and stressful. In addition, it is considered good practice to obtain informed consent or assent from all patients. However, clinicians are often unsure if a patient with intellectual disabilities has understood explanations of procedures. It is difficult for people with intellectual disabilities to understand how abstract information relates to them with the result that, compared to the general population, patients with intellectual disabilities find it significantly more difficult to make healthcare decisions. This study aims to develop a computer based communication system to support people with intellectual disabilities to understand dental procedures with the aim of reducing anxiety for both patients and clinicians, and to enable patients to be more involved in the decision making process. The system will run on a tablet device, e.g. an iPad. The system will automatically generate a story about a dental procedure which is personalised to the patient. This will allow the dentist to explain the procedure to the patient using a graphical interface. The patient will be able to use the system to ask questions about the procedure and express their feelings. We know that improved communication reduces the anxiety in both the patient and the dentist. This research will investigate whether giving more information to patients with intellectual disabilities improves the outcomes for: (i) the patient; (ii) the practitioner; and (iii) the health service by reducing the time and the resources required to support patients with intellectual disabilities. While this has the potential to produce benefits across the health service, this study will focus on dental health.

Our goal is to develop a computer tool which helps children who cannot speak create a story about their day at school. Story telling is an essential aspect of social interaction, and story-telling skills are developed through practice. It is difficult for non-speaking children to get such practice, our tool will help them.More specifically, we want to use various kinds of sensors to acquire information about where the child went, what she did, and who she interacted with; write a computer program which automatically creates a draft story based on this data; and create a story editing and narration interface which lets children edit the draft story and then tell it when they are happy with it. Possible sensors include GPS for tracking where children go, RFID tags for tracking what objects children interact with and hence their activities; and barcode scanners for recording who children interact with. The story-generation software will be based on technology for generating English summaries of data which has been developed in other EPSRC-funded projects such as SumTime, RoadSafe, and BabyTalk. The story editing interface will probably be based on a visual timeline metaphor.Our work will be informed and guided by several user groups, including children, parents, and teachers. We will use a user-centred design philosophy throughout.We will build a simple prototype system at the end of the project, and do a small-scale evaluation with two children. If the feasibility study is successful, we will explore funding opportunities to further develop this concept.

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the third cause of cancer death worldwide. In 2018, about 1.8 million new cases were reported worldwide with a mortality of almost 900,000. This has increased more than 30% since 2012. Studies have shown that regular screening and early detection can reduce mortality by up to 70%. The proposed project will undertake interdisciplinary research to design a low-cost, disposable, autonomous Soft Endorobot (SoftEn) to examine the lower intestine painlessly. SoftEn offers disruptive potential to replace the current optical colonoscopy (OC), including a dual capability of investigation and performance of autonomous surgical tasks. SoftEn will overcome OC's limitations (operator-dependent, patient pain/discomfort, high costs, decontamination). Crucially, the high level of autonomy will reduce the time in performing the procedure as well as shift screening process from secondary to intermediate or primary care, thus saving precious time for diagnosis and intervention. Advantages of this approach are: 1. Efficiency of the procedure will be augmented by reducing the human-operator skills required to perform the procedure. This will increase the number of procedures performed every year. 2. Reducing the waiting list will consequently improve the CRC stage of detection and will increase the patient survivability due to early intervention and reduced cost of treatment. 3. Less pain and discomfort will increase the patient acceptability of the screening as well as patient experience. This has the potential to make sedation unnecessary, which in turn would make hospital visits shorter. 4. Autonomous robot examination of the large intestine would remove restrictions of the traditional operator-dependent OC and would enable an increased access to investigation. Optical diagnosis and tissue diagnosis could be achieved in most of the procedures, including patients requiring more advanced intervention. 5. Potentially improve screening uptake through reducing barriers to participation. 6. The use of polymers implies a reduction in production costs, allowing the device to be single-use and avoiding additional costs required for a traditional OC, including sterilisation and reprocessing. This will reduce the UK cost in CRC procedures. 7. AI software will allow the endorobot to perform procedures autonomously. A clinician can therefore supervise several devices and intervene only if needed via an external ergonomic control console, locally or remotely. This will limit the use of clinicians' time and increase the number of investigations performed per day. Additionally, more clinicians will be able to perform the procedure supporting the national endoscopy workflow.