Mental health issues and stress is rising, with a substantial economic cost on society; in 2011, the UK Department of Health reported mental health costs of £105billion. People need time and restorative environments to help them recover from stressors and deter mental health problems. However, as reported by the World Health Organisation, increased environmental noise exposure in urban environments is having a detrimental impact on people's mental health and wellbeing. Urban sounds can at times be positively evaluated and support restoration, but little is known on how to design environments to create these positive 'soundscapes'. Although research into soundscapes and cognitive restoration is growing, there are still disconnects with applied built environment design. This project innovatively integrates these different disciplinary areas of research. It draws on the disparate existing information to create a tool to advance knowledge on the relationships between these areas, thereby providing a means to inform evidence-based designs. The aim of the project is to develop a visual soundscape simulator of urban quiet and calm areas to assist in Designing and Engineering Soundscapes To enable Restorative Environments for Sustainable Societies (DeStress). The visual soundscape simulator (VSS) will be both informative and a methodological research instrument. Novel features of the VSS include the presentation of audio and visual stimuli, the inclusion of positive and negative sounds, the ability to adapt the scene and sound sources to represent multiple virtual built environment sites, and the mapping of soundscape health outcomes. It will provide the opportunity to determine the objective (independently measured) and subjective (self-report) health outcomes of exposure to different built environment infrastructure and their resultant soundscapes. Project DeStress will be structured by four Work Packages (WP) to meet the aim, each producing research outcomes with long term public and social, industrial, economic, policy, and academic impact. WP1 will establish any disconnects between council and public identified quiet and calm urban areas. This will aid policy guidance for identification methods of quiet and calm areas, which currently only include sound levels and physical size. WP2 creates pre-rendered audio-visual virtual simulations of real and engineered quiet and calm urban areas, and then provides a soundscape map including typical health outcomes from those who experience such a place. This provides acoustic consultants, contractors, planners, and environmental health officers with evidence-informed design outcomes to assist with their planning decisions. Usability testing in WP3 will ensure the VSS is user-friendly with appropriate soundscape map visualisations and clear graphical interfaces to engage the public and practitioner end-users. Public accessibility of the online tool helps inform the public about the impact of urban soundscapes on their health and wellbeing. This empowers them with knowledge for campaigning for appropriate preservation of restorative soundscapes through contributing to Local Community Planning Partnerships. Finally, validation tests in WP4 of the accessible online VSS will determine the accuracy of the tool and will enable experimental research into increased understanding of the relationship between soundscapes, restoration, and the design of built environments. This will assist the development of sustainable urban healthy societies.

Almost every major disease in the developed world - Alzheimer's, cancer, obesity and diabetes- shows a causal link to lack of sleep. Sleep disruption degrades mental health, reduces work-place productivity and increases absenteeism, and increases the burden on health and social care systems. Homes that remain comfortable at night enable quality sleep which enhance health and well-being and supports continued independent living. Sleep is eroded by numerous personal factors such a stress and ill-health, but environmental factors are also important, especially bedroom temperatures. In a recent national survey over 4.5 million English households reported bedrooms that were often or always uncomfortably warm. Dwellings in London and the SE of England were most affected with flats, small dwellings and modern buildings particularly at risk. Socially disadvantaged households were disproportionately affected. As the climate warms, the frequency, intensity and duration of heatwaves is increasing. As cities become denser, the urban heat island intensifies, and noise levels rise. In the 2003 European heat wave, there may have been over 70,000 premature deaths in 16 countries across Europe. There are concerns that rising temperatures will initiate the uptake of air-conditioning (AC) in dwellings, which will place additional loads on the electricity supply networks and, as AC is costly to buy and run, will accentuate the societal inequalities. Bedroom adaptations and behavioural change can improve the indoor environment. Public Health England's recommendations on staying cool in the summer are generic, and their applicability for many households in unknown. Whilst effort is being directed to reducing night-time overheating in new dwellings, there is no guidance, and no regulation, to protect existing dwellings from overheating. This project brings together a multi-disciplinary team of sleep scientists, engineers and experts in user centred design and health. They will work with social housing providers, local authorities, housing developers and government departments. Healthy adults of all ages living in flats in London will be actively involved in the study. Sleep quality measurement, sleep diaries, questionnaires, environmental monitoring, dwelling surveys and thermal modelling will seek to answer three questions: 1. What environmental factors (night-time temperatures, noise levels and air quality) lead to degradation of sleep quality in different people? Currently, for example, there is no credible UK night-time overheating criterion. 2. How might people achieve better quality sleep? Simple behavioural changes before and during sleep, or bedroom adaptations, like shading and improved ventilation, can improve summertime comfort, but by how much and for which people living in which sort of flats? 3. How might existing homes be refurbished to both reduce energy demand and improve summertime comfort? The work involves people living in flats in London, who will help refine the research programme and enable monitoring of their bedrooms and sleep quality, and the way they control temperatures during heat waves. They will be the first beneficiaries of the research. The work is important to builders, engineers and architects who lack a robust method for predicting overheating risk, and to social housing providers who want to objectively target properties that provide unacceptable summertime conditions. The research will also: provide social and healthcare professionals with better advice about how people can improve summer night-time comfort; enable social housing providers to plan and prioritise refurbishment, and inform future building regulations concerned with maintaining comfort, without air-conditioning, in existing buildings. Most importantly, the work will protect the health and well-being of UK citizens as urbanisation continues and the climate warms.

Poor air quality is widely recognised to affect human health and wellbeing. Cumulative exposure to pollutants throughout the life course is a determinant for numerous long term health conditions including dementia, heart disease and diabetes, Short term high exposures are shown to exacerbate conditions such as asthma and COPD, increase risks of heart attacks and stroke and influence respiratory infections. The very young, very old and those with pre-existing conditions are most at risk and inequality further increases this; the poorest in society often live in the lowest quality housing in the most polluted areas. Human exposure to air pollutants occurs in both indoor and outdoor environments. Urban air pollution results from a combination of local outdoor sources (e.g. transport, combustion, industry) and regional and large scale atmospheric transport of pollutants. We spend up to 90% of our time indoors and indoor air quality is therefore a significant part of human exposure. Indoor air quality is influenced by the climate, weather and air quality in the external environment in addition to local indoor sources (e.g. microorganisms, chemicals cleaning and personal care, cooking, industry processes, emissions from building materials, heating and mechanical systems) and the building design and operation. In all cases it is the airflows within and between indoor and outdoor locations that enables the transport of pollutants and ultimately determines human exposures. Understanding airflows is therefore at the heart developing effective mitigating actions, particularly in cases where there is limited ability to remove a pollutant source. Being able to predict the influence of airflows enables understanding of how pollutants are likely to move within and between buildings in a city, both under normal day-to-day conditions and in response to emergencies such as heatwaves or wildfires. With the right computational and measurement tools it is then possible to change the design or management of city neighbourhoods enabling better urban flows to reduce exposure to pollutants and also to innovate new ventilation solutions to control the indoor environment in buildings. While there are a number of approaches that already enable assessment of urban flows and indoor flows, these aspects are not currently considered together in an integrated way or focused on optimising environments for health. The Future Urban Ventilation Network (FUVN) aims to address this by defining a new holistic methodology - the Breathing City. This will define a new integrated assessment approach that considers coupled indoor-outdoor flows together to minimise exposure for people within a neighbourhood who are most at risk from the effects of poor air quality. The network will bring together people from a range of disciplines and areas of application with a common interest in improving urban and indoor airflows to improve health. Through small scale research and workshop activities we will advance the understanding of the fluid dynamics that determines the physics of this indoor-outdoor exchange. The network will develop a research programme to address technical gaps in modelling and measuring pollutant transport and how we can use this to determine long and short term exposures to a range of pollutants. We will work collaboratively with industry, policy makers and the public to understand how this approach could change city planning, building design guidance and community actions to enable health based future urban ventilation design and to "design out" health risks for people who are most vulnerable.

The acoustics industry contributes £4.6 billion to the UK's economy annually, employing more than 16,000 people, each generating over £65,000 in gross value added across over 750 companies nationwide. The productivity of acoustics industry is similar to that of other enabling technologies, for example the UK photonics industry (£62k per employee in 2014). Innovation through research in acoustics is a key to its industry success. The UK's acoustics industry and research feeds into many major global markets, including the $10 billion market for sound insulation materials in construction, $7.6 billion ultrasound equipment market and $31 billion market for voice recognition. This is before the vital role of acoustics in automotive, aerospace, marine and defence is taken into consideration, or that of the major UK industries that leverage acoustics expertise, or the indirect environmental and societal value of acoustics is considered. All the four Grand Challenges identified in the 2017 UK Industrial Strategy require acoustics innovation. The Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund (ISCF, https://www.ukri.org/innovation/industrial-strategychallenge-fund/) focuses on areas all of which need support from acoustics as an enabling technology. The future of acoustics research in the UK depends on its ability to contribute to the Four Grand Challenges. Numerous examples are emerging to demonstrate the central role of acoustics in addressing the four Grand Challenges and particularly through more focused research. The acoustics-related research base in the UK is internationally competitive, but it is important to continue to link this research directly to the four Grand Challenges. In this process, the role of UK Acoustics Network (UKAN) is very important. The Network unites over 870 members organised in 15 Special Interest Groups (www.acoustics.ac.uk) who represent industry, academia and various non-academic organisations which success relies on the quality of acoustics related research in the UK. UKAN was funded by the EPSRC as a standard Network grant with the explicit aim of pulling together the formerly disparate and disjoint acoustics community in the UK, across both industry and academia. UKAN has been remarkably successful. Its success is manifested in the large number of its members, numerous network events it has run since its inception in November 2017 and contribution it has made to the acoustics research community. Unfortunately, UKAN has not been in the position to fund new, pilot adventurous or translational projects nor has it any funding support for on-going research or knowledge transfer (KT) activities. The purpose of UKAN+ is to move beyond UKAN, create strategic connections between acoustics challenges and the Grand Challenges and to tackle these challenges through pilot studies leading in turn to full-scale grant proposals and systematic research and KT projects involving a wider acoustics community. There is a great opportunity for the future of the UK's acoustics related research to move on beyond this point, build upon the assembled critical mass and explore the trans-disciplinary work initiated by UKAN. Therefore, this proposal is for UKAN+ to take this community to the next stage, connect this Network more widely in the UK and internationally to contribute through coordinated research to the solution of Grand Challenges set by the government. UKAN+ will develop a new roadmap for acoustics research in the UK related to Grand Challenges, award exploratory (pilot) cross-disciplinary research projects to the wider community to support adventure research and knowledge transfer activities agreed in the roadmap and support the development of develop full-scale bids to the government research funding bodies which are aligned with the Grand Challenges. UKAN+ will also set up a National Centre or Coordination of Acoustics Research, achieve full sustainability and support best Equality, Diversity and Inclusion practices.