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PhD Engineering Studentship in Human Activity Recognition (2025)

What you get

For 3.5 years, you will receive a tax-free stipend at a standard rate of £19,237 per year and your fees will be waived (at the UK, EU, or International rate). In addition, to a one-off Research and Training Support Grant of £2,000. 

Type of award

Postgraduate Research

PhD project

Human Activity Recognition (HAR) has many applications from sport tracking, and healthcare, to robotics and automatous vehicles. It is often implemented using cameras or wearable sensors. However, these have several drawbacks; wearable sensors have to be placed on the body, and cameras rely on line of sight vision and good illumination. An alternative method is to analyse the stray reflected signals that are generated using common Wi-Fi signals. As a person walks through the EM field, these reflections can be measured. This can cope with occlusions, for example seeing through a wall.  

By training deep learning models, we can then infer what a person is actually doing. This method is not however perfect. Issues such as the number of people that can be tracked at once is a limitation, as is noise and the nature and amount of occlusions. Increasing the coverage, better models and combining the passive Wi-Fi and computer vision together could potentially produce more accurate results when presented with complex environments. This PhD will explore this research area. 

Potential applications include human activity recognition, tracking people, tracking crowds, medical movement disorder diagnosis (e.g. Parkinson’s disease), sports and healthcare analysis.

Eligibility

This scholarship is available to UK, EU and overseas applicants. 

Eligible candidates will have an upper second-class (2:1) undergraduate honours degree (or equivalent qualification) in a related field. 

The ÈÕº«ÎÞÂë believes that the diversity of its staff and student community is fundamental to creative thinking, pedagogic innovation, intellectual challenge, and the interdisciplinary approach to research and learning. We celebrate and promote diversity, equality and inclusion amongst our staff and students. As such, we welcome applicants from all backgrounds.

Number of scholarships available

1

Deadline

31 December 2024 23:49

How to apply

Apply online for a full time PhD in Engineering (MAY or SEPT 2025) using .

Please clearly state on your application that you are applying for the PhD Engineering Studentship in Human Activity Recognition under the supervision of Dr Phil Birch.

Please ensure you application includes each of the following: 

• A research proposal.
• Your CV.
• Degree certificates and transcripts. 
• 2 references, including a minimum of 1 from any institution studied at within the last 5 years.
• If your first language is not English you will need to demonstrate that you meet the University’s English language requirements, see for details of our accepted documentation.

Contact us

For general queries, please email phd.engineering@sussex.ac.uk.

For project specific queries, please email P.M.Birch@sussex.ac.uk.

Timetable

Deadline: 31st December 2024

Interview: TBC approx January 2025