Around 1 in 4 people have multiple long-term conditions (MLTCs) rising to up to two-thirds in people over the age of 65 years. Treatment for this group is estimated to take up 70% of health care expenditure. Such people have poorer health, poorer quality of life, and a higher risk of dying. Key challenges for this group of people include maintaining their independence in their homes, avoiding developing further conditions that can threaten their health, and which would further impair their quality of life and minimising the high burden of healthcare for this group potentially made worse by uncoordinated health and social care. Our challenge is to improve outcomes through informed self-care and maintaining independence, while reducing healthcare costs. The current model for many MLTCs is for people to present to urgent care services when they can no longer cope at home. This reactive approach leads to frequent use of emergency hospital services when a severe episode occurs, shifting the focus of care to hospitals. Management then follows generic pathways within acute healthcare, in an attempt to stabilise the condition of the patient. Information-driven technologies will enable people to perform their own health management, which will change the model of care. Individuals will be able to manage their condition proactively. The integration of knowledge concerning individuals' co-morbidities (which are common in MLTCs) will allow personalised therapy, further maintaining independence, improving patient outcomes, and optimising the use of resources. The proposed programme "Healthcare Wearables for Independent Living" (HW-IL) aims to develop, for the first time, a suite of predictive tools, based on regular wearable devices, to allow a step-change in the self-care of patients with MLTCs, and in the maintenance of their independence by avoiding deterioration. Patients and their carers will be guided, using such tools, to preventative management. For the first time, such tools will incorporate an integrated approach, exploiting patient-worn devices (at or near the patient), and healthcare data (from GPs and hospital information systems), working in real-time. All work will be ethically approved, and accord to the highest standards of patient confidentiality.

Thermal management and heat dissipation have become the main technological challenges for the next generation of electronic and photonic devices. Heat generated by any electronic device must be effectively dissipated to improve performance, reliability and prevent premature failures. There is an urgent need for novel electronic materials with a high thermal conductivity. Presently there are only a very limited number of cost-effective and reliable high thermal conductivity materials which can be used in electronic devices, including for passive cooling. The ideal material is diamond, with a thermal conductivity as large as 2300 W/mK. However, it is costly to produce, and there is a mismatch between diamond's coefficient of thermal expansion and majority of semiconductors. Copper (~400 W/mK) and its alloys for example with tungsten, and aluminium (~200 W/mK) remain the most widely used materials for heat dissipation in current electronic devices. Boron arsenide (BAs) is a semiconductor with a band gap of ~1.5 eV. Interest in the BAs system has been reignited by recent theoretical predictions that BAs has an ultrahigh thermal conductivity, comparable to that of diamond. In 2018 three groups independently reported the growth of BAs microcrystals with a thermal conductivity close to diamond. It has been demonstrated that BAs-microcrystal cooling substrates allow to exhibit substantially lower hot-spot temperatures in GaN transistors due to their unique phonon band structures and interface matching, beyond those when using diamond and silicon carbide substrates. This illustrates the potential for using BAs in the thermal management of electronics, however, present BAs crystals are only a few mm in size. Furthermore, due to its beneficial electronic properties, BAs is not only attractive for passive cooling of electronics such as GaN, but also by itself a very promising novel material to be transformative for electronic and photovoltaic devices. Now the main challenge in realising the potential of this novel material is to develop a scalable technology of high-quality BAs layers. Boron nitride (BN) exists in several structural polytypes. Hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) polytype, graphite-like, is thermodynamically the most stable phase and presently the most widely explored polytype. The lamellar crystal structure made hBN one of a major 2D material. However, of even greater interest is the much less explored cubic structural polytype of BN - zinc-blende (cBN). cBN does not have a laminar structure and could be more easily integrated with standard semiconductor device heterostructures. Cubic boron nitride is a semiconductor with much larger bandgap energy of ~6.4 eV, which makes it a very important new material for potential deep ultraviolet (DUV) light-emitting and power electronic applications. cBN also has a very good isotropic thermal conductivity and therefore has high potential in heat sink devices. The first cBN bulk microcrystals were recently demonstrated. However, a scalable technology for cBN layers is not yet developed. This project will develop a transformative scalable technology for the boron-based semiconductors, which promise to revolutionize the areas of power electronics and photonics. Boron-based materials, including boron arsenide (BAs), cubic boron nitride (cBN) and highly mismatched BNAs alloy layers, will enable a wide optical range from infrared (IR) to deep ultraviolet (DUV) for photonics and will allow layers with high thermal conductivity. High breakdown fields will allow their applications in power electronics. Our vision is that molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) provides the most promising route to the scalable growth of the cubic boron-based semiconductors. This will be the first project world-wide enabling scalable high thermal conductivity boron-based layers using MBE as main growth method.

The forecast by International Telecommunication Union (ITU) predicts that by 2030, the overall mobile data traffic will reach 5 zettabytes (ZB) per month. Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is the most celebrated mobile technology that provides the needed upgrade from 2G to 3G, from 3G to 4G and most recently from 4G to 5G in the form of massive MIMO. In 5G, the number of antennas at the base station (BS) has been increased to 64 and more are expected in future generation to cope with the rising demands. A major limitation of massive MIMO is however the cost of incorporating the large number of RF chains and linear power amplifiers (PAs) in the system. Massive MIMO at a user equipment (UE) remains unthinkable. Recently, software-controlled metamaterial or programmable metasurface has emerged as a novel technology to enhance wireless communications system performance. Software-controlled metamaterials (or "meta-atoms" in short) can alter their electromagnetic (EM) properties to suit the purpose of various communication applications. On the one hand, they can be deployed on large surfaces to provide a smart radio environment by optimising the meta-atoms for reducing interference, enhancing security, extending the range of communication, and many more. On the other hand, they can also be used to mimic the signal processing for MIMO without the need for the increase in the number of RF chains and PAs. This metasurface-based MIMO is much more scalable in terms of costs and may make ultra-massive MIMO feasible in the future. Despite the early successes, there are critical challenges that greatly limit the impact of metasurface in mobile communications. From severe pathloss (poor propagation efficiency) to the difficulty for interference control, narrow bandwidth of meta-atom, and the bulkiness of metasurface MIMO, many fundamental challenges need to be overcome to truly unleash the potential of metasurfaces. In this project, our aim is to tackle the challenges. In particular, we propose to utilise SWC (surface wave communications) in addition to the usual space wave communications in a novel way for both the smart radio environment and ultra-massive MIMO applications. The proposed research exploits the unique features of SWC and is the first in the world to introduce SWC in the design of mobile communications networks which is anticipated to revolutionise mobile communications by making possible the following characteristics: -> Favourable propagation characteristics - The use of SWC provides pathways in the radio environment to have much less propagation loss for a smart radio environment. -> Ease of interference management - Surface waves are made to be confined to the surface and radio waves appear only where they should be. -> SWC-aided metasurface MIMO - SWC provides a novel architecture that miniaturises the design of metasurface MIMO and improves its energy efficiency greatly, which will make massive MIMO possible even at the side of UE. - Wideband meta-atom - This project will also design a new meta-atom technology that has a wider bandwidth and the capability to switch between being a radiating element, a reflector, a diffractor or a propagation medium. This project will benefit from the strong support from BT, Toshiba and City University of Hong Kong for testbed implementation and ensuring industrial impact.

The antenna, as an essential device for radio systems and "Internet of Things", is in high demand in a wide range of wireless products. It has traditionally been made of good conductive materials (such as copper) to minimise the ohmic loss and maximise the radiation efficiency. However conductive/metal antennas are not ideal for some applications. For example, at lower frequencies, they are normally large, heavy and expensive. They also produce relatively large radar cross sections which are not good for military applications. Furthermore, they are solid - once the antennas are made, it is hard to make them reconfigurable and flexible in terms of the electromagnetic performance and mechanical configurations. Recently, water antennas have been studied and found that they could overcome many problems facing the traditional metal antennas and offer some attractive and unique features, such as small in size, cost effective, transparent, flexible and reconfigurable. However, they cannot work at low temperatures (e.g. below 0 degree C) and may suffer from low radiation efficiency and low power handling capacity problems, which make them not suitable for practical applications. Thus, better alternatives to water and conventional metal antennas are required for a wide range of real world applications. In this project, we are going to develop a new type of antenna: liquid antennas, which will offer all the advantages but overcome the problems that water antennas have. The main challenges are 1) How to identify the most suitable liquid materials with low loss, thermal and mechanical stability which will work over the desired temperature range (from -30 to +60 degree C), frequency range (from kHz to GHz), and RF/microwave power range (up to kW). 2) How to design and make compact and efficient liquid antennas which are flexible or reconfigurable in terms of the main antenna parameters (such as the operational frequency, radiation pattern, and size) and suitable for real world applications. This is an interdisciplinary project which requires expertise from radio frequency (RF) and microwave engineering, chemical and material science. It consists of both theoretical and experimental work. A wide range of liquid materials (not limited to water and sea water) will be studied, especially ionic liquids and antifreezes. Their electromagnetic, thermal and mechanical properties will be screened against temperature, frequency and RF/microwave power levels with the ultimate goal being to make reconfigurable, small liquid antennas to work efficiently and effectively over a wide temperature, frequency and power range. In addition, the reconfigurable techniques suitable for liquid antennas will also be studied thoroughly and two reconfigurable liquid antennas will be developed, optimised to demonstrate their excellent potential features for both military and commercial applications. The work will be undertaken in collaboration with industrial leaders (BAE Systems and Huawei) and academic expert (Prof Luk from Hong Kong) to ensure that this research will bring new knowledge into material science and radio engineering, a novel type of antenna will be introduced to meet the demands from the industry and provide an alternative compact reconfigurable and/or flexible device to the wireless world. The research outcomes of this study (e.g. the liquid and reconfigurable technology) could be extended to other RF and microwave devices (such as filters, delay lines and phase shifters) where low-loss dielectric materials may be used.

International research suggests that in response to climate change global cities are now engaging in strategic efforts to effect a low carbon transition. That is, to enhance resilience and secure resources in the face of the impacts of climate change, resource constraints and in relation to new government and market pressures for carbon control. But significant questions remain unexplored. First, limited research has been undertaken internationally to comparatively examine how different cities in the north and south are responding to the challenges of climate change. Second, it is not clear whether the strategic intent of low carbon transitions can be realised in different urban contexts. Consequently, we propose to establish an international network, to be undertaken between leading scholars on urban climate change responses as an important step towards addressing these deficits. The network will focus on the research and policy issues involved in comparing and researching the broader dynamics and implications of low carbon urbanism. This network includes Australia, China, India, South Africa and the US and builds on existing scholars and research teams with whom we currently have bilateral and ad hoc collaborations. Our proposed collaboration is designed to create greater density of network connections and enhancing the depth of each connection by three sets of initiatives: 1. International Networking Opportunities: The first element of the ESRC initiative will be to support significant international research opportunities for UK researchers. We will undertake programmed and structure visits to each national context to: increase knowledge of one another's research and plans; to gain intelligence about the research landscape in the partner countries in this field in order to build up a global picture of research expertise; to exchange ideas about possible future collaborative research projects; and to build personal relationships that are at the heart of successful long-distance research partnerships. 2. International Comparative Collaboration: The second element of the network is to facilitate interaction between the partners in the research network and with a wider group of UK and international researchers through two connected forum that will meet four times. A. International Research Workshops (Network partners plus other relevant UK and international researchers). These meetings will focus primarily on enhancing comparison and collaboration with a wider group of researchers but will also serve as an important opportunity for developing publications in the form of special issues and edited collections. B. Network Partners Research Forum (Network partners only). The network will also sponsor a number of much smaller research forums, focused on the network partners. These workshops will enable a structured and protected space for the partners to share the findings from their ongoing work, and to explore and examine the implications of the issues and themes emerging from the larger workshops in this context. 3. International Network Infrastructure: The third element will focus on establishing the necessary infrastructure for promoting effective international research collaboration. The network will pursue two projects. A. Information Infrastructure: Durham will establish a website that facilitates collaboration among international partners. All partner researchers and institutions will have the opportunity to present and regularly update information about their ongoing research. The website will also serve as a base for communicating about events, visits, awards, etc. The website will also host audio and video recordings of workshops. B. International Network Coordinator: Additionally Durham will support a 20% network coordinator to manage and organize the visits, workshops, teleconferences and the website.