Physical activity and behaviour is a very large component in an array of long-term chronic health conditions such as diabetes, dementia, depression, COPD, arthritis and asthma, and the UK currently spends 70% of its entire health and social care budget on these types of conditions. All aspects of self-care, new therapies or management conditions, require novel non-intrusive technologies able to capture the salient data on causes and symptoms over long periods of time. The OPERA Project - Opportunistic Passive Radar for Non-Cooperative Contextual Sensing - will investigate a new unobtrusive sensing technology for CONTEXUAL SENSING - defined as concurrent physical activity recognition and indoor localisation - to facilitate new applications in e-Healthcare and Ambient Assisted Living (AAL). The OPERA platform will be integrated into the "SPHERE long term behavioural sensing machine" to gather information alongside various other sensors around the home so as to monitor and track the signature movements of people. The OPERA system will be built around passive sensing technology: a receiver-only radar network that detects the reflections of ambient radio-frequency signals from people - in this case, principally, the WiFi signals in residential environments. These opportunistic signals are transmitted from common household WiFi access points, but also other wireless enabled devices which are becoming part of the Internet of Things (IoT) home ecosystem. The project will make use of cutting-edge hardware synchronisation techniques, and recent advances in direction finding techniques to enable accurate device-free (non-cooperative) localisation of people. It will also employ the latest ideas in micro-Doppler radar signal processing, bio-mechanical modelling and machine/deep learning for automatic recognition of both everyday activities e.g. tidying and washing-up, to events which require urgent attention such as falling. OPERA is expected to overcome some of the key barriers associated with the state-of-the-art contextual sensing technologies. Most notably non-compliance with wearable devices, especially amongst the elderly, and the invasion of privacy brought about by the intrusive nature of video based technologies.

We are living through a revolution, as electronic communications become ever more ubiquitous in our daily lives. The use of mobile and smart phone technology is becoming increasingly universal, with applications beyond voice communications including access to social and business data, entertainment through live and more immersive video streaming and distributed processing and storage of information through high performance data centres and the cloud. All of this needs to be achieved with high levels of reliability, flexibility and at low cost, and solutions need to integrate developments in theoretical algorithms, optimization of software and ongoing advances in hardware performance. These trends will continue to shape our future. By 2020 it is predicted that the number of network-connected devices will reach 1000 times the world's population: there will be 7 trillion connected devices for 7 billion people. This will result in 1.3 zettabytes of global internet traffic by 2016 (with over 80% of this being due to video), requiring a 27% increase in energy consumption by telecommunications networks. The UK's excellence in communications has been a focal point for inward investment for many years - already this sector has a value of £82Bn a year to the UK economy (~5.7% GDP). However this strength is threatened by an age imbalance in the workforce and a shortage of highly skilled researchers. Our CDT will bridge this skills gap, by training the next generation of researchers, who can ensure that the UK remains at the heart of the worldwide communications industry, providing a much needed growth dividend for our economy. It will be guided by the commercial imperatives from our industry partners, and motivated by application drivers in future cities, transport, e-health, homeland security and entertainment. The expansion of the UK internet business is fuelled by innovative product development in optical transport mechanisms, wireless enabled technologies and efficient data representations. It is thus essential that communications practitioners of the future have an overall system perspective, bridging the gaps between hardware and software, wireless and wired communications, and application drivers and network constraints. While communications technology is the enabler, it is humans that are the producers, consumers and beneficiaries in terms of its broader applications. Our programme will thus focus on the challenges within and the interactions between the key domains of People, Power and Performance. Over three cohorts, the new CDT will build on Bristol's core expertise in Efficient Systems and Enabling Technologies to engineer novel solutions, offering enhanced performance, lower cost and reduced environmental impact. We will train our students in the mathematical fundamentals which underpin modern communication systems and deliver both human and technological solutions for the communication systems landscape of the future. In summary, Future Communications 2 will produce a new type of PhD graduate: one who is intellectually leading, creative, mathematically rigorous and who understands the commercial implications of his or her work - people who are the future technical leaders in the sector.