There is an urgent, unmet need for reliable, intelligent systems that can monitor patient condition in the home, and which can help patients manage long-term conditions. Delays in recognition of the changes in physiological state worsen outcomes and increase healthcare costs. The ASPIRE programme uses chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder (COPD) as an exemplar, which affects over 210 million people globally. This condition costs the National Health Service over £800 million each year, over half of which is spent treating patients in hospital, rather than caring for them in their homes. Intelligent monitoring systems are required to address the needs of patients with long-term conditions in their homes. However, no wearable systems have penetrated into clinical practice at scale, due to: (i) poor tolerance of existing wearable devices for monitoring; (ii) a lack of robustness in the estimates of the vital signs that wearable sensors produce; (iii) very limited battery life that requires batteries to be re-charged at a rate that prevents their use on a large scale; and (iv) limited subsequent use of the data for helping the patient understand and manage their condition. We propose to develop an "intelligent" home-based system, with smart algorithms embedded within lightweight healthcare sensors, to overcome these limitations. Our novel work will incorporate next-generation machine learning algorithms to combine information from healthcare sensors with information from GP and hospital visits. This will enable the system to learn "normal" health condition for individual patients, with knowledge of other conditions from which they may be suffering, and which can then make recommendations to the patient concerning self-management of their condition. This work will include close working with world-leading clinicians to ensure that the recommendations provided by the system are correct for the individual patient.

NICE requires research to help it decide which treatments and diagnostic methods should be funded by the NHS. NICE has highlighted the need for research into the methods for reviewing evidence from research. Identifying research studies underpins most NICE reviewing. Methodological search filters are widely used to identify specific research designs such as randomized controlled trials or economic evaluations. Search filters are carefully selected collections of words and phrases used to search databases to identify research. Little is known about how well search filters work in finding research. This means that their use as a standard tool for NICE researchers may not be informed by adequate information to indicate how search filters perform across different subjects, questions and databases. Our proposal is to investigate how search filter performance can be measured and what measures are most useful to researchers. We also plan to investigate systems and approaches to provide better access to relevant and useful performance data on methodological search filters. The benefits of this research would be to enhance the tools and knowledge of the tools available to find research evidence to inform NICE appraisals, guidelines and other guidance. The research findings would also benefit other national technology assessment agencies, guidelines groups and related bodies.

Every year scientific journals publish tens of thousands of articles describing findings from health research studies. However, readers and users of these articles, who include scientists, clinicians, systematic reviewers, and increasingly also patients, find many of these articles very difficult or impossible to use: many articles do not present enough information, present only selected information, or present information in a very unclear and misleading way. All this makes many papers unusable. The effort and money devoted to the research described in such an unsatisfactory manner is wasted. A simple solution to improve the completeness, accuracy and clarity of research papers is to follow reporting guidelines. Many guidelines exist that provide step by step guidance of what should be addressed in a paper reporting on a particular type of health research. These guidelines have been developed from the users' perspective and guide authors to provide minimum information a user needs to assess how well was the study done, to decide if the findings are relevant to his/her own work, and if needed to reproduce the study (ie. what was actually done and to whom, what was assessed and how, how were these findings analysed, and what they actually mean in the context of other similar studies). Although many good guidelines exist they are still not widely known and used by health scientists. Recent reviews of publications consistently show that essential information is missing from a large proportion of research articles. In this time of massive information overload it is important to have a single good quality resource where you can easily find all relevant information you need. In 2008, we launched the EQUATOR programme that aims to enhance the quality and transparency of health research. One of the most important outputs of this programme is a free online Library for Health Research Reporting that brings together all published reporting guidelines and other helpful tools that aid the writing and publication of research reports and thus improve the information provided to readers. The EQUATOR team educates scientist and journal editors, who play a key role in safeguarding the quality of published papers, to increase their knowledge of what should be included in research papers and how best to achieve it. EQUATOR also helps scientists to develop high quality reporting guidelines and conducts research investigating problems in research reporting. Our proposal outlines specific deliverables and activities for the next three years that will further advance the programme. The main outputs include: improved structure and content of our Library; development of unique EQUATOR 'signature' courses supporting rigorous research reporting; compilation of a manual for the development of robust reporting guidelines; a research report summarising the use of reporting guidelines by selected priority journals; and a database of evaluations of reporting quality of scientific papers across health research specialties. Medical journals publish large numbers of research reports that are of limited value because of crucial omissions. This waste is avoidable. The EQUATOR website and training can be compared to a well stocked and well promoted supermarket where you can get everything you need to write and publish first class research papers. The knowledge of what needs to be included in research papers that are clear and easy to use also improves the design of future research studies. Our work helps to improve usability and usefulness of published medical research and helps scientists to become outstanding research communicators.

Medical imaging techniques such as MRI have revolutionised clinical diagnosis, treatment and monitoring of disease. However, they are expensive and not readily accessible outside specialist units. Imagine if instead, there was available a high-street eye test that provided diagnostic information for a range of diseases. These diseases could be neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's, systemic diseases (diseases with wide-spread effect on the body) such as heart disease, or psychiatric conditions, such as depression. The test would be sensitive, picking-up signatures of disease before any symptoms were apparent and before irreparable damage had occurred, and allowing fine scale monitoring of changes in response to treatment. It would offer specificity, differentiating between diseases with different aetiologies but similar retinal manifestations. This would allow mechanistic understanding of disease progression, paving the way for future therapies. The key to realising this vision is the application of recent technological advances from microscopy, image and signal processing to high-resolution optical imaging of the living human retina. The retina, which is the tissue at the back of our eye, is in fact a part of the central nervous system and has long been recognised as a window to the brain and vasculature. In fact, psychiatric, neurodegenerative, and systemic diseases have been shown to have detectable correlates in the eye. However, current clinical technology cannot image individual cells, and so these diseases manifest in gross anatomical changes that cannot be distinguished amongst diseases. We will develop a non-invasive optical instrument, capable of imaging individual cells and testing their function, for sensitive and specific detection of these diseases. The technology would revolutionise point-of-care medicine by providing rapid, non-invasive diagnostics on a range of conditions, replacing costly, time-consuming current gold standard methods. Our team is a collaboration between technology developers and ophthalmic specialists, spanning engineering and medical science within partner institutions. We already have experience in human participant testing across the life-span with bespoke optical instrumentation, and extensive experience in commercialisation of technology, industrial partnership and spin-outs. The required technological components - for example, optical interferometry, adaptive optics, spectroscopic and polarisation techniques, holography, and dedicated image and signal processing - are available in the related fields of microscopy and ophthalmoscopy, but delivering an integrated instrumentation package remains a significant engineering challenge. The development phase will be vital for establishing proof-of-principle demonstrations to engage stakeholders, and to target efforts to those areas that are most likely to have 'disruptive' impact in healthcare. Stakeholders - clinicians, industry partners and patient groups - will be engaged through local NHS Trusts and teaching hospitals, existing industry networks and charities representing specific patient cohorts. During the development phase we will widen and deepen these networks. With a long-term view, we will engage at all levels of medical training - from the pre-clinical undergraduate to the established consultant. Three significant challenges facing society are the high incidence of mental health issues across the population, cardiovascular disease, and neurodegenerative diseases which disproportionately affect the elderly and are of great concern in an ageing society. Dementia and heart disease are the leading causes of death in the UK, and indeed world-wide. Faster and more effective diagnosis and treatment of such debilitating conditions will significantly improve outcomes for these patients. Widespread uptake of the technology will lead to new business growth through commercialisation.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.