A number of DBT (prototype) project ideas exist within the following...

When a flood warning is issued in your area, how do you know whether your exact location is safe?

The UK Met Office provides free access to their web API: DataPoint which gives general weather forecast, including extreme weather event warnings.  The UK Environment Agency provides free access to their real-time flood monitoring API, which gives detailed data from its flood monitoring stations.  Both sources also give historical data, which could potentially be used in conjunction with the Environment Agency flood maps to estimate level of risk for any given location.

How feasible is it to estimate the likelihood of flooding at a specific location within mainland UK at any given time?  How accurate might that estimate be?  What apps already exist that provide some or all of these features?

If you discover that flooding or getting cut-off by flooding at your exact location is imminent, how do you know where to escape to?

It may be possible to invert the above search to find areas within a given region that are least likely to be affected by flooding.

How do you work out the best means and route of escape to a specific safe location?

A number of open source route planning web APIs are freely available to use.  Open route service is one interesting example, as it provides a host of features including elevation information, which could be used as a crude input to a real-time(ish) flood map estimate.  In a flood emergency, there is likely to be an increase in road traffic on (potential) routes out of flood zones.  Moreover, the drivers are likely to be in heightened states, which may increase risk of traffic incidents.  When planning a motor-vehicle escape route, it makes sense to also consider real-time traffic data.  A number of freely available traffic web APIs are available, including TomTom.  The traffic and flood data could possibly be combined to produce a list of places to avoid as input to the route planner.

How feasible is it to estimate the nearest safe locations when flooding is imminent?  How feasible is it to estimate the best escape route?  What apps already exist that provide some or all of these features? 

For any gym goer it is often important to record the specifics of what exercises were done in each session, be that minutes on a bike or similar cardio machine, reps on any of the various weight training machines or cardio circuits on the studio floor.

There are already a number of applications in existence for doing similar (see here), so can these be researched, reviewed and improved upon, or a whole new (better) way of doing this devised.

This project would expect students to do the research, find out what gym goers want and then design-build-test an application (mobile or web) to solve the problem identified.

Food waste is a huge problem in the western world, and as we move into a time of economic uncertainty with the cost of living becoming a real problem for very many, the desire to cut down on food waste is ever more pressing for very many people.

This project involved research into the problem and how technological advances and a variety of technologies could be used to help mitigate or solve the problem.

The project envisages, following on from this research an application or other similar tool can be developed to provide a potential solution for how individuals can minimise their own food wastage.

Universities are increasingly under pressure to monitor and track student attendance. This project has two potential outcomes for students, namely a research project into options available for this, or an interventional project where an end product is produced to meet a brief produced based on research undertaken.

Project Option 1 - Research

Research into the importance of student attendance monitoring and its implications, including primary research on both students and staff. Explore and critically evaluate the options currently available for technology solutions for monitoring and recording student attendance.

Project Option 2 - Design-Build-Test

Research into the importance of student attendance monitoring and its implications, including primary research on both students and staff. Develop an application, either mobile or web based which will enable efficient and effective monitoring and recording of student attendance. Examples of this could be a mobile phone application that teaching staff could use to scan bar codes on student ID cards or individual QR codes for each student, then record attendance for each session in a secure database.

Existing Examples

Recording and Monitoring Attendance

A Students Attendance System Using QR Code

Student attendance using QR code card

There are a large number of staff employed at a local employer, each of who have their own individual allocation of annual leave to take during the working year; which runs from 1st sept to 31st Aug annually.

Depending on the level at which a member of staff is employed they have between 28 and 36 days leave per year.

Currently the employer uses a paperbased system to record staff annual leave, where a member of staff is given an annual leave card in which they record which days they intend on taking off as annual leave, which is signed off by their line manager. Once this is done they hand their card to an administrator who enters the details onto a speadsheet and shared outlook calendar.

The company would like a technical solution to this where each member of staff can log into an electronic system to book their days off, which is then signed off electronically by their line manager, co-signed by the administrator and automatically recorded onto a system.

Your task it to research into the wide range of options for development of such a system, then DESIGN - BUILD - TEST your solution.

There is a need for students to be able to book appointments to see their academic staff during their open office hours.

Office hours for staff need to be able to be added to the system, or ideally pulled from Outlook calendars so that students can chose meetings of either 10, 15, 20 or 30 minutes duration inside the scope of the staff member's office hours. Alternatively a staff member might like to stipulate the lengh of the meeting and when their office hours are manually.

This project will see you independently build the skills required to develop the software in a web accessible format so that students can book appointments to see academic staff.

Your task it to research into the wide range of options for development of such a system, then DESIGN - BUILD - TEST your solution.

An interesting feature of the Microsoft Kinect depth sensor is the occasional/spurious appearance of 'orbs' in the infra-red camera output.  A number of reports have been made about this, and we have seen them a few times ourselves when working with the device.  Setting aside the heated discussion as to what these 'orbs' are (as they cannot be normally seen by the naked eye), it would be interesting to see how the depth sensor component of the Kinect interprets these anomalies (ie in terms of the resulting point-cloud data).

To this end, we would like you to Design-Build-Test an application that detects orbs in the infra-red camera image, and upon detection, it triggers a recorder, so that the Kinect's point-cloud data output and infra-red video output is captured to disk.

Although the artefact (ie your software) will be a key deliverable, we will also need to see:

• a requirements specification and plan, developed through background research/study and discussions with your supervisor
• a detailed and reasoned software design
• a development plan/log based on the above design
• a test strategy and log, showing the planned approach to verification and the results of your tests.  As a part of this, you will need to include a method for 'cheating' the Kinect sensor using an infra-red element of a scene that is not in the visible spectrum.