Deloneliness (Smart textile for monitoring and help to reduce loneliness)

Start date: 2 May 2022
End date: 1 November 2025
Funder: EPSRC
Primary investigator: Professor Yu Shi FIMMM, CEng
External co-investigators: Prof Wei Liu

Value

£251,974

Partners and collaborators

King's College London

Description

Loneliness is a growing health concern in a rapidly ageing society. As Age UK noted in 2018, 1.4 million older people class themselves as often lonely, and it is estimated this will rise to 2 million people over the aged of 50 by 2025. Loneliness, typically defined as a "discrepancy between one's desired and achieved levels of social relations" is generally experienced by over one third of older people. The subjective feeling of loneliness has been associated with a range of negative outcomes including increased prevalence of physical and mental illness, all-cause mortality, and risk of self-harm. Whilst issues of loneliness may be overlooked by health and social service professionals, the COVID-19 pandemic could have accelerated these issues due to lockdown. Reduced access to social support networks, community events and family highlight the need to detect and support those who are lonely at home. It is of paramount importance to refine methods of identifying loneliness in those who are isolated to allow timely and effective intervention. This proposal aims to develop a smart monitoring and communication system with multifunctional electronics built into textiles used as wearables and home furniture to measure loneliness levels in older people.

The main objective of this research is to determine different levels of loneliness via bespoke multi-sensing monitoring, identifying those at risk of loneliness and highlight priorities for targeted intervention and decreasing the risk of developing serious healthcare issues with support of them to live independently.

DELONELINESS is an interdisciplinary project bringing academic experts from Social Gerontology, Psychology, Design, Smart Composite Material, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) and industrial partners as well as policy makers to: (i) to understand the conditions of being lonely and (ii) to develop a smart system to measure and monitor loneliness.

Project website

https://gow.epsrc.ukri.org/NGBOViewGrant.aspx?GrantRef=EP/W031442/1