Urinary tract infections (UTI) are one of the most common types of infection, impacting more than 92 million people worldwide. When diagnosed early, UTI's can readily be resolved with antibiotics. However, left untreated, it can lead to urosepsis (>1.6 million deaths), kidney damage and ultimately death. Identifying the early symptoms of a UTI can be challenging, symptoms are different in younger and older people and people with underlying health conditions. In addition, there is no one symptom but a collection of symptoms that indicate a person has a UTI. These include changes to urine: colour, smell, frequency; incontinence, pain, confusion, agitation delirium, temperature, shaking and changes in sleep. This concoction of symptoms is what makes identifying the signs of a UTI difficult for the person concerned and/or their carers. This project will gather data about the activities of an individual in their home on a continuous basis. By having data on activities of daily living, it is possible to identify changes. The Feather platform will combine these data points to recognise the emergence of a UTI. This is in fact quite difficult for an individual themselves or a carer to see. Thus, the Feather project will be able to raise an alert for investigation of a UTI, before a person could do it themselves, enabling early intervention, to get appropriate treatment quickly. For example, the following can all be indicators of behaviours that are impacted by the symptoms of UTI's, patterns for activities of daily behaviour, e.g. kettle use, change in walking pace, cognitive function through interaction with an intelligent agent, e.g. an embodied robot. The Feather project could enable a GP to have the time to wait for lab results to urine tests to ensure appropriate prescription of antibiotics, reducing the cost to the NHS of prescriptions and improving outcomes for the patient. Early diagnosis should reduce the number of patients presenting at A&E and reduce the number of cases developing to urosepsis, kidney failure and ultimately death. Working with stakeholders, we will co-design, co-implement and co-evaluate the Feature project.

Heat demand in the UK accounts for around 44% of final energy consumption and is currently predominantly obtained by burning natural gas and oil, representing about 90% of the fuel share, while renewable energy sources supply only a fraction of it. Recent legally binding net-zero targets for greenhouse gas emissions (by 2045 in Scotland and by 2050 for the UK), will truly test our nation's technical and engineering competence and ability to innovate. The net-zero transition will not only require radical changes in technologies-it will also result in a profound impact on our society. A targeted decarbonisation framework, built from the participation and contribution of every home and every customer, is needed, so each of them may find optimal place and role as a fully functioning part of a wider smart energy system. This will require innovation. DISPATCH asserts that a net-zero transition in the UK should be planned and realised as a "bottom-up" and "user-centric" approach, where scalability and flexibility are obtained through the aggregation, sharing and control of the resources of individual customers, in such a way that the search for optimal solutions always starts with customers' needs and always ends without reducing customers' comfort levels and sacrificing their wellbeing. DISPATCH will focus on multi-vector energy solutions for decarbonisation of heating and cooling in residential and typical commercial applications (office buildings, educational facilities, etc.). These can be specified as generic parameterised models, as opposed to medium and large industrial and non-domestic applications. Our decarbonisation framework will also include cooling, which is anticipated to increase due to climate change-caused global warming (since 1884, all of the UK's ten warmest years occurred in years from 2002), but also due to provision of automatic or user-set temperature regulation by reversible heat pumps. Furthermore, as the net-zero transition through electrification of heating requires electrical-thermal solutions to be better in all aspects than the currently predominant natural gas infrastructure for heating, we will use electrification of heating as a "reference case" for comparative evaluation and ranking of other considered decarbonisation routes. Arguably, the highest potential for the provision of flexibility and balancing services is through increased customer participation in energy management and coordinated shifting of energy demands in the UK's 27 million homes and 1.4 million SMEs. However, to ensure wider customer engagement and to increase their willingness to take part in various demand-side management (DSM) schemes, they should be able to access appropriate energy exchange and energy trading services for their voluntary or interest-based participation. DISPATCH approaches the above challenges as actual opportunities for exploring synergies, interoperabilities and the overall integration potential of different energy vectors, in order to identify the most cost-effective solutions for reshaping and redistributing energy flows. For example, we will repurpose balancing and demand shifting controls used in normal operating conditions as low-cost resources for automated frequency response in emergency conditions, and compare its benefits with recently introduced procurement of stability as an ancillary service by NGESO.

The EMERGENCE network aims to create a sustainable eco-system of researchers, businesses, end-users, health and social care commissioners and practitioners, policy makers and regulatory bodies in order to build knowledge and capability needed to enable healthcare robots to support people living with frailty in the community. By adopting a person-centred approach to developing healthcare robotics technology we seek to improve the quality of life and independence of older people at risk of, and living with frailty, whilst helping to contain spiralling care costs. Individuals with frailty have different needs but, commonly, assistance is needed in activities related to mobility, self-care and domestic life, social activities and relationships. Healthcare can be enhanced by supporting people to better self-manage the conditions resulting from frailty, and improving information and data flow between individuals and healthcare practitioners, enabling more timely interventions. Providing cost-effective and high-quality support for an aging population is a high priority issue for the government. The lack of adequate social care provisions in the community and funding cuts have added to the pressures on an already overstretched healthcare system. The gaps in ability to deliver the requisite quality of care, in the face of a shrinking care workforce, have been particularly exposed during the ongoing Covid-19 crisis. Healthcare robots are increasingly recognised as solutions in helping people improve independent living, by having the ability to offer physical assistance as well as supporting complex self-management and healthcare tasks when integrated with patient data. The EMERGENCE network will foster and facilitate innovative research and development of healthcare robotic solutions so that they can be realised as pragmatic and sustainable solutions providing personalised, affordable and inclusive health and social care in the community. We will work with our clinical partners and user groups to translate the current health and social care challenges in assessing, reducing and managing frailty into a set of clear and actionable requirements that will inspire novel research and enable engineers to develop appropriate healthcare robotics solutions. We will also establish best practice guidelines for informing the design and development of healthcare robotics solutions, addressing assessment, reduction and self-management of frailty and end-user interactions for people with age-related sensory, physical and cognitive impairments. This will help the UK develop cross-cutting research capabilities in ethical design, evaluation and production of healthcare robots. To enable the design and evaluation of healthcare robotic solutions we will utilize the consortium's living lab test beds. These include the Assisted Living Studio in the Bristol Robotics Lab covering the South West, the National Robotarium in Edinburgh together with the Health Innovation South East Scotland's Midlothian test bed, the Advanced Wellbeing Research Centre and HomeLab in Sheffield, and the Robot House at the University of Hertfordshire covering the South East. Up to 10 funded feasibility studies will drive co-designed, high quality research that will lead to technologies capable of transforming community health and care. The network will also establish safety and regulatory requirements to ensure that healthcare robotic solutions can be easily deployed and integrated as part of community-based frailty care packages. In addition, we will identify gaps in the skills set of carers and therapists that might prevent them from using robotic solutions effectively and inform the development of training content to address these gaps. This will foster the regulatory, political and commercial environments and the workforce skills needed to make the UK a global leader in the use of robotics to support the government's ageing society grand challenge.