Dr Geoff Merrett of the Electronics and Electrical Engineering research group in ECS is appearing at the prestigious Times Cheltenham Science Festival today (Friday 7 June).

The other members of the energy harvesting panel are Paul Mitcheson and heart surgeon Sukumaran Nair, who is looking at the use of wireless power transfer to keep artificial hearts pumping. The discussion will cover energy harvesting devices which capture energy that would otherwise be wasted and store it for future use. Vibration from engines, temperature gradients and even energy in blood sugar can all generate enough energy to power electronic devices. Dr Merrett writes about his appearance at the Festival and the impact of his research on his website

Another member of ECS has a prominent role in the Festival. Professor Dame Wendy Hall, Dean of the Faculty of Physical Sciences and Engineering, is Guest Director this year. Writing on the Festival website, Dame Wendy expresses her support for the breadth of the Festival’s coverage of science: "What I love about the Cheltenham Science Festival is the appetite for science I see there. From children all the way through to senior citizens, the audiences, as well as the topics, are so diverse and people just love it! The thing that really surprises me is how much science is packed into the Festival."

The Times Cheltenham Science Festival is a six-day celebration of science, engineering and the arts aimed solely at the general public. It is widely acclaimed as the UK's leading science festival and is renowned for its creative programming. Aiming to present a broad range of science and scientific issues in an exciting and engaging environment, the event includes a variety of formats including debates, panel discussions, single speaker talks, interactive workshops and exhibitions. The Festival continues to grow each year, with 39,000 tickets issued in 2012 and 17,000 visitors at free exhibitions and events.

Marc de Vos, a third-year student in ECS has developed the world’s first screen-printed digital watch on fabric for his Part III Individual Project.

Marc's work was selected for presentation at the annual Smart Textiles Salon, held last week in Gent, Belgium. This event showcases prototype smart fabrics from industry and academia to a wide European audience.

The watch display is printed directly on to fabric to achieve the world’s first printed smart-fabric watch. The watch is printed layer by layer using screen-printable pastes with electronic functionality such as conduction, insulation and electroluminescence.

The electroluminescent displays were printed by Marc using the thick-film printing facilities in the Southampton Nanofabrication Centre cleanroom.

“Marc has used the world-class facilities available in the department to produce his prototype. Presenting his work at the conference shows what is possible for our undergraduate students to achieve during their time here,â€? says his supervisor Dr Russel Torah, Senior Research Fellow in Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton.

Marc, who has just completed the third-year of his four-year MEng degree in Electromechanical Engineering, commented: “The project has given me the chance to put the theory learnt over the last three years into practice and led to my involvement in the brand new field of printed smart fabrics.â€? Marc’s project is a continuation of the development of smart fabrics as part of the successful EU FP7 “MICROFLEXâ€? project which was successfully completed recently within the department.

Researchers at the University of Southampton have proposed an answer to the long-running debate as to how stable the Earth system is. The Earth, with its core-driven magnetic field, oceans of liquid water, dynamic climate and abundant life is arguably the most complex system in the known Universe. Life arose on Earth over three and a half billion years ago and it would appear that despite planetary scale calamities such as the impacts of massive meteorites, runaway climate change and increases in brightness of the Sun, it has continued to grow, reproduce and evolve ever since. Has life on Earth simply been lucky in withstanding these events or are there any self-stabilising processes operating in the Earth system that would reduce the severity of such perturbations? If such planetary processes exist, to what extent are they the result of the actions of life? Forty years ago James Lovelock formulated his Gaia Hypothesis in which life controls aspects of the planet and in doing so maintains conditions that are suitable for widespread life despite shocks and perturbations. This hypothesis was and remains controversial in part because there is no understood mechanism by which such a planetary self-stabilising system could emerge. In research published in PLOS Computational Biology, University of Southampton lecturer Dr James Dyke and PhD student Iain Weaver detail a mechanism that shows how when life is both affected by and alters environmental conditions, then what emerges is a control system that stabilises environmental conditions. This control system was first described around the middle of the 20th Century during the development of the cybernetics movement and has until now been largely neglected. Their findings are in principle applicable to a wide range of real world systems - from microbial mats to aquatic ecosystems up to and including the entire biosphere. Dr Dyke says: “As well as being a fascinating issue in its own right, we quite desperately need to understand what is currently happening to the Earth and in particular the impacts of our own behaviour. “Pretty much whatever we do, life on Earth will carry on, just as it did for the previous 3.5 billion years or so. It is only by discovering the mechanisms by which our living planet has evolved in the past can we hope to continue to be part of its future.â€? A copy of the paper “The emergence of environmental homeostasis in complex ecosystemsâ€? published in PLOS Computational Biology is available in full.

ECS researchers are part of an interdisciplinary research collaboration that has been awarded a £12m grant from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to develop a 24/7 digital home health assistant.

The University of Southampton joins the University of Reading, Bristol City Council, IBM, Toshiba and Knowle West Media Centre (KWMC), in the Sensor Platform for Healthcare in a Residential Environment (SPHERE) project that will be led by the University of Bristol.

SPHERE aims to have a profound impact on the health and wellbeing of people with a range of different health challenges by developing a practical technology to monitor people’s health in the home environment, targeting health concerns such as obesity, depression, stroke, falls, cardiovascular and musculoskeletal diseases.

As part of this five-year project the ECS team from the Electronics and Electrical Engineering Group will be exploring ways in which energy can be supplied to body worn devices without the need for batteries.

Their work will build on extensive research that they have already carried out into energy harvesting and creating micro-devices that are powered by external sources such as vibrations rather than batteries. This new project allows them to investigate how their results so far can be incorporated into textiles to be worn by the patient at home.

Professor Steve Beeby, who is leading SPHERE’s ECS group, said: “It is an absolutely fantastic opportunity for us to be part of a major project like this. It enables us to do some really good investigations into the future use of energy harvesting technology and electronic textiles.â€?

As well as the ECS involvement the University of Southampton also has UK-leading expertise and lab facilities for studying movement in stroke and Parkinson’s disease rehabilitation, and also conducts research into falls and impaired balance.

Professor Ann Ashburn, Professor of Rehabilitation at the University of Southampton, says: “We have limited knowledge of the ways in which individuals move about, negotiate obstacles and on some occasions become unsteady and fall over in their homes. This exciting research opportunity will allow us to detect these situations and make major contributions to fall prevention among the older population.â€?

SPHERE’s vision is not to develop fundamentally-new sensor technologies for individual health conditions, but rather to impact all these healthcare needs simultaneously through data-fusion and pattern-recognition from a common platform of non-medical/environmental sensors at home.

The system will be general-purpose, low-cost and accessible. Sensors will be entirely passive, requiring no action by the user and suitable for all patients, including the most vulnerable. An example of SPHERE’s home sensor system could be to detect an overnight stroke or mini-stroke on waking, by detecting small changes in behaviour, expression and gait. It could also monitor a patient’s compliance with their prescribed drugs.

Importantly, SPHERE will work hand-in-hand with the local community through Bristol City Council and its partners at KWMC. Leading clinicians in heart surgery, orthopaedics, stroke and Parkinson’s disease, and recognised authorities on depression and obesity will also be involved with the project, along with the Elizabeth Blackwell Institute for Health Research, Bristol Health Partners and Bristol’s NIHR-funded Biomedical Research Units.

Professor Jeremy Tavaré, Deputy Director of the collaboration, comments: “The involvement of patients, carers, nurses and clinicians from the outset of this project will be key in ensuring acceptability of these exciting new technologies.â€?

Once practical, user-friendly technologies have been developed further, they will be piloted in a large number of homes over extended periods of time.

Professional William Harwin in the School of Systems Engineering at the University of Reading, adds: “The production of ubiquitous and unobtrusive 'passive sensors' is a key constituent part of this project. These sensors could be embedded in clothing or jewellery, or more ambitiously implanted, possibly in association with remedial surgery.

“Information from these sensors will monitor and track the signature movements of people in their homes and trigger a response in accordance with health needs. This will enable health care experts to respond as appropriate.â€?

Rodric Yates, Program Director in IBM's Chief Technology Office, says: “Although healthcare budgets and changing demographics are creating serious challenges, the latest technological advances can help society keep pace with this environment. We were pleased to be invited by the University of Bristol to join this important project and will contribute by drawing upon some of the best examples from around the world in healthcare sensing, medical data collection and analysis, and the delivery of healthcare systems. Improving patient care in a cost-effective way and helping people stay independent, for longer, is an objective we share with the University and the city.â€?

The money awarded to the University of Bristol by the EPSRC is part of a wider package of £32m investment in three new healthcare IRCs. The other two projects are:

Early-warning sensing systems for infectious diseases - next generation smartphone test and tracking systems for serious infections including new strains of influenza, MRSA and HIV - led by UCL (University College London) with Newcastle University, Imperial College London, and The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Multiplexed ‘Touch and Tell’ Optical Molecular Sensing and Imaging - a fibre-optic device to detect potentially fatal lung conditions in intensive care patients, and to continuously monitor the blood in critically ill adults and babies without the need for blood sampling. Led by the University of Edinburgh with Heriot-Watt University and the University of Bath.

Professor Nigel Shadbolt, one of the world’s leading experts in Web Science and the pioneering co-founder of the Open Data Institute (ODI) , has been knighted in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List for services to science and engineering.

Professor Shadbolt, Head of the Web and Internet Science Group at the University of Southampton and ODI Chairman, is one of the co-creators of the interdisciplinary field of Web Science. Confirmation of this prestigious honour comes just months after colleague and fellow Southampton Professor Sir David Payne was awarded a knighthood for services to photonics, the science and application of light and electronics.

Professor Shadbolt is a Director of the Web Science Trust and of the Web Foundation - both organisations with a common commitment to advance the world’s understanding of the Web and to promote the Web's positive impact on society. Together with fellow Southampton Professor and inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Professor Shadbolt established the ODI in East London’s Tech City last December. The organisation is a catalyst for innovation, focused on unlocking supply and creating demand for open data to generate economic, environmental and social benefits.

“I’m surprised and delighted to be recognised with this very special honour,â€? said Professor Shadbolt. “I'm fortunate to have been involved at a crucial period working with outstanding colleagues in the development of both Web Science and the Open Data movement. I hope that I can continue to make a difference as we seek to understand how the web is evolving, and ensure that we are empowered individually and collectively.â€?

In a career spanning some 30 years, Professor Shadbolt has over 400 publications to his credit in topics ranging from cognitive psychology to computational neuroscience, Artificial Intelligence to the Semantic Web. In 2009 the Prime Minister appointed Professors Shadbolt and Berners-Lee as Information Advisors to transform access to Public Sector Information. This work led to the highly acclaimed data.gov.uk site that now provides a portal to thousands of datasets.

In April 2011 Professor Shadbolt became Chair of the UK Government’s midata programme -which seeks to empower consumers by releasing their data back to them.

University of Southampton Vice-Chancellor Professor Don Nutbeam commented: “I am delighted that the unique contribution Nigel has made through his research and advisory work is being recognised with this prestigious honour.â€?

ODI Chief Executive, Gavin Starks said: “This is very well deserved. Nigel has been instrumental in helping government understand the power of the Web and Open Data over the past decade. As the founder and Chairman of the ODI, he is inspirational in his support of our work and we would like to congratulate him on being awarded this honour.â€?

Professor Dame Wendy Hall, Dean of the Faculty of Physical Sciences and Engineering at the University of Southampton added: "This honour is richly deserved and I know that all of his colleagues at the University of Southampton will celebrate his success. Nigel is at the forefront of some of the most important and historic developments of the way in which we use and interact with the web and a true world leader in the field of open data and its benefits to society."

Vodafone UK has unveiled its Power Shorts and Recharge Sleeping Bag ahead of the Isle of Wight Festival - two innovations that have the capability to harvest body heat and movement to boost the battery life of mobile devices at summer events.

The technology is being developed in partnership with the Electronics and Computer Science experts at the University of Southampton, with the aim of providing a 24-hour source of power for people camping at outdoor music events.

State of the art materials and smart fabrics are being trialled to enable the Power Pocket to function via two different energy-gathering methods – thermal for the sleeping bag and kinetic for the shorts:

• Kinetic energy is mechanically gathered when ferroelectret materials incorporated into the product are squashed or deformed. These foam-like materials contain voids - the surfaces of which are permanently charged. As the size and shape of the voids changes, a net charge is produced at the surface of the material.

• Thermal energy harvesting comes from the ‘Seebeck effect’, a process that produces a voltage from the temperature differences across a thermoelectric module. In this case, the modules are printed on the fabric of the sleeping bag.

Current trials show that after a full day’s walking and dancing, the harvesting material in the Power Shorts will have been through enough activity to charge a smartphone for over four hours. In addition, heat generated during an eight-hour snooze in the Recharge Sleeping Bag could add 11 hours onto a smartphone’s battery life.

Stephen Beeby, Professor of Electronic Systems at the University of Southampton, has consulted with Vodafone to assess the state-of-the-art development. Professor Beeby, who holds of an EPSRC Leadership Fellowship in the field of energy harvesting, is leading a team of researchers to provide a toolbox of materials and processes suitable for a range of different fabrics that will enable users to develop the energy harvesting fabric best suited to their requirements. Applications for the research include using the energy to power wireless health monitoring systems, as well as consumer products such as MP3 players. Applications also exist in the automotive sector.

"With Vodafone we are exploring two specific technologies to charge the Power Pocket: thermoelectrics and kinetic energy harvesting," he explained. "Both represent cutting edge research around smart fabrics and we are looking to integrate these into consumer products, in this case, a sleeping bag and a pair of denim shorts.�

Vodafone UK’s Director of Communications, Christian Cull said: “Our ambition was to create a practical but exciting solution to the charging-related issues experienced by many at outdoor events. We hope that people harness the power in their pocket to keep them chatting, texting, browsing and photographing throughout their entire festival season!â€?

Academics from the universities of Southampton and Reading have joined forces to open a virtual cafe to help raise people’s awareness of the exciting research they are carrying out.

Virutal Cafe Scientifique is based on the long-running Cafe Scientifique – an international initiative that aims to give people the chance to explore the latest ideas in science and technology for the prices of a cup of coffee or a glass of wine. Meetings usually take place in cafes, bars, restaurants and even theatres but always outside a traditional academic context.

But as well as taking their talks out into pubs and cafes in the community, researchers from Electronics and Computer Science, at the University of Southampton, and from the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, at the University of Reading, have also launched a cyber cafe to try and engage the people on the street.

Virtual Cafe Scientifique has been set up by Professor Alun Vaughan, Head of Electronics and Electrical Engineering group at Southampton, and Averil Macdonald, Professor of Science Engagement at Reading.

“We want to let people know about some of the exciting science and engineering research being carried out at the University of Southampton such as focusing on how our research will lead to improvements in energy generation and transmission and benefit the environment, and how research on the World Wide Web will improve the way people with special needs can access the internet,â€? said Alun.