Available
Project number:
2025_100
Start date:
October 2025
Project themes:
Main supervisor:
Senior Software Development Group Leader
Co-supervisor:
Professor Richard Dobson
Additional Information:
Developing Mobile Health Foundation Models
Background: Over the past decade, wearable devices have become invaluable for collecting extensive physiological and behavioural data with wide-ranging research and clinical applications. However, interpreting and effectively using these large datasets for health monitoring and predictive insights remains challenging.
Novelty and Importance: Foundation models, which have transformed fields like natural language processing and computer vision, offer a promising solution. This project will leverage a comprehensive collection of public and private datasets—including RADAR-CNS, Covid Collab, and PhysioNet—maintained by the mobile health lab, to develop and train a new large sensor health model. The focus will be on adapting and refining foundational model architectures to address key applications such as data imputation, disease detection, and activity classification, with an emphasis on ensuring the model’s interpretability and clinical relevance.
Aims and Objectives: The project aims are to develop a foundation model tailored for wearable health data analysis, enhancing insights from diverse datasets by curating multiple sources to improve generalization, and address data sparsity and bias. The models will be applied to tasks such as imputation, disease prediction, and activity classification, with a focus on creating interpretable outputs for clinical use, while maintaining rigorous quality control to ensure data integrity, completeness, and ethical standards.
We are now accepting applications for 1 October 2025
How to apply
Candidates should possess or be expected to achieve a 1st or upper 2nd class degree in a relevant subject including the biosciences, computer science, mathematics, statistics, data science, chemistry, physics, and be enthusiastic about combining their expertise with other disciplines in the field of healthcare.
Important information for International Students:
It is the responsibility of the student to apply for their Student Visa. Please note that the EPSRC DRIVE-Health studentship does not cover the visa application fees or the Immigration Health Surcharge (IHS) required for access to the National Health Service. The IHS is mandatory for anyone entering the UK on a Student Visa and is currently £776 per year for each year of study. Further detail can be found under the International Students tab below.
Next Steps
- Applications submitted by the closing date of Thursday 6 February 2025 will be considered by the CDT. We will contact shortlisted applicants with information about this part of the recruitment process.
- Candidates will be invited to attend an interview. Interviews are projected to take place in April 2025.
- Project selection will be through a panel interview chaired by either Professor Richard Dobson and Professor Vasa Curcin (CDT Directors) followed by informal discussion with prospective supervisors.
- If you have any questions related to the specific project you are applying for, please contact the main supervisor of the project directly.
For any other questions about the recruitment process, please email us at