We welcome Neil to the Cobot Maker Space. Neil is a Senior Research Fellow based in the Faculty of Medicine & Health Sciences at the University of Nottingham. Neil is exploring whether a telepresence social robot can facilitate engagement, strengthen cultural identity and improve orientation for people with dementia in South Asian communities in the East Midlands. He is especially interested in studying whether telepresence can support social interaction with family caregivers, for the main caregiver and also other family members, who may live at a distance. The aim of Neil’s project is to co-design and evaluate how people interact with telepresence robots when used with specific methods to engage and reduce agitation of people with mild to moderate dementia of South Asian background living in East Midlands.

This work is supported by the NIHR ARC-East Midlands DEM-COM programme, which aims to build capacity in dementia research through supporting the new generation of research leaders in this important area of study.

Neil has previously worked with our partners Horizon Digital Economy Research. Recent projects include the Memory Machine (1.0, 2.0 and 3.0) which investigated contextualising personal memories to create digital souvenirs and digital repositories.