Question: why do you need the money and what do you plan to do in the future?

Alan Winfield answered on 21 Mar 2011:

As I said in my profile, I’ve become interested recently in something called community robotics. This means making simple low-cost robot gadgets that ordinary people can use to make their lives better. Later this year I will have some visitors from America, from the Create Lab (http://createlab.ri.cmu.edu/) in Pittsburgh, who have done some amazing community robotics projects and if I were to win I’m a Scientist I would use the money to try out some of their ideas here in Bristol – while at the same time putting it all on the web so everyone can see the project as it unfolds and make use of it’s technology – I’m really passionate about combining research with science communication so they always go together.

The particular community robotics project I would like to do is something that will help people monitor and track their own health and wellbeing. Imagine a situation where you find you can’t sleep well at night but you don’t know why. And it has become serious as it’s affecting your schoolwork. What if you had a simple device that was able to record things about what’s happening while you are sleeping (when you cough at night for example) and also the temperature, noise level and levels of pollution through the night. If you could collect that data and then send it (perhaps through your smart phone) to a webpage that shows that the things that are happening to you – to disturb your sleep – are connected to environmental changes in your room during the night, then you might find simple things you could do to really improve your quality of sleep. Like maybe moving the position of your bed, or fitting different kinds of curtains. Do you think this is a good idea?

If I were to win I would use the money to help with a very small pilot project. If the pilot were successful then I would try and get a larger grant to extend the project to help more people.