The proportion of elderly people is increasing worldwide. In the UK, the Office for National Statistics estimates that "The number of people aged 75 and over is projected to rise by 89.3%, to 9.9 million, by mid-2039; the number of people aged 85 and over is projected to more than double, to reach 3.6 million by mid-2039; and the number of centenarians is projected to rise nearly 6 fold, from 14,000 at mid-2014 to 83,000 at mid-2039". Consequently, conditions such as diabetes, obesity, dementia, Parkinson's disease are expected to increase their incidence, with more and more people affected by multiple conditions at the same time (multimorbidity). Furthermore, statistics in the UK show that "falls and fractures in people aged 65+ account for over 4 million hospital bed days each year in England alone, and the healthcare cost associated with fragility fractures is estimated at £2bn a year". Physical consequences of fall events (fractures, contusions, open wounds, abrasions, strain, and concussions) often require treatment at A&E departments if not hospitalisation, but they also lead to anxiety and loss of independence. All these reduce the quality of life of the people affected and of their families, as well as generate public costs for healthcare provision. Our project will investigate how radar technologies will help vulnerable individuals (older people and people with cognitive or physical impairments, or with multi-morbidity conditions) preserve their independence and quality of life, and provide caregivers and health professionals with individualised information on each patient. In practical terms, our system will monitor activity levels over longer periods of time to detect early signs of cognitive and functional decline, providing not only prompt detection of critical events (e.g. falls, strokes), but also predicting these events from indicators in the data that will enable individualised prompt treatment and intervention from health professionals. Radar sensors transmit and receive electromagnetic waves similar to those used by common devices such as Wi-Fi routers, and the analysis of the received echoes can provide information on how and where a person moves. Radar offers the advantage of providing contactless and non-intrusive monitoring, with no need for the end-users to carry or interact with devices, or alter their behaviour, and no need to record direct optical images of them. This makes these sensors attractive as a potential alternative to wearable sensors and conventional video-cameras, or as a complementary sensor to those ones. Our project will combine cutting-edge research in the field of electronic engineering and machine learning, with end-users engagement from the very early stages (older people, caregivers, health professionals, community members). We will take into account their inputs, requirements, issues, attitudes in relating with our technology, and inform the design and technical choices while developing our system. This will enable to address potential users' acceptance issues and barriers to the development and adoption of the technology, an element of strength to maximise the impact of our proposal.

Policy and practice across the UK and beyond is committed to improving the lives of people who use services and unpaid carers. Over the past five to ten years there has been a particular concern to shift health and social care systems away from an exclusive focus on their own inputs, processes and outputs to give a more prominent focus to personal outcomes for people using services and unpaid carers. In this context the term personal outcomes is used to refer to both the impact and end results of services and supports on a persons life and more simply, what matters to people. The proposed project builds on a seven year programme of knowledge exchange and service improvement that has been led by two of the applicants (Dr Ailsa Cook and Dr Emma Miller) and funded by the Joint Improvement Team in Scotland. This programme, known as Talking Points, has involved work with more than 130 organisations to support the development of outcomes focussed practice. A key finding emerging from the Talking Points programme is that limited capacity and skills in the analysis of qualitative and quantitative personal outcomes information within health and social care organisations constitutes a significant barrier to effective outcomes focussed project. Furthermore, this issue is exacerbated by the predominance of performance cultures that prioritise consistency, comparability and measurability of information over meaning. Over the past year 15 partner organisations have worked together to develop this proposal for funding from the ESRC. The partner organisations have all been involved in the Talking Points programme and include the following academic, practice and national stakeholder partners: University of Edinburgh (host institution), University of Strathclyde, University of Swansea Angus Council, Bridgend County Borough Council, City of Edinburgh Council, East renfrewshire Health and Care Partnership, Moray Health and Social Care Partnership, Penumbra, Stirling Council, VOCAL (Voice of Carers Across Lothian) Joint Improvement Team, Community Care Benchmarking Network, The ALLIANCE, Social Services Inspection Agency. The proposed project involves both collaborative action research and knowledge exchange elements. Specifically the academic team will support each of the practice partners to engage in an action research project focussed on the analysis and use of personal outcomes data routinely collected through assessment and review processes within their organisations. Co-ordination and collaboration between these projects will be primarily achieved through the convention of three 'data retreats' two day workshops where project partners work together to develop capacity and skills, exchange knowledge and reflect on the process. The contribution of national stakeholder partners will ensure that the findings of this project are effectively disseminated to and implemented within a wider constituency of health and social care organisations. This will be achieved through support for a range of knowledge exchange processes, including events, dissemination of materials and staff time to work with other organisations not directly involved in the project to implement the findings in their own practice. Engagement with these partners, all of whom are actively involved in shaping policy, will ensure that the project findings influence national policy, in particular in relation to the development of national outcome performance reporting frameworks. In these ways it is anticipated that the proposed project will bring significant benefits not only to partner and provider organisations, but to the wider health and social care system. The short term impacts of the project will be systematically evaluated through a process of contribution analysis. Findings from this contribution analysis and the project as a whole will be widely disseminated, including to academic audiences.