Leaders in their field
Dr Rachel Moran and Dr Radhika Loomba were awarded their PhDs during WIT’s conferrings last week
Dr Moran is postdoctoral researcher at the Nutrition Research Centre Ireland (NRCI) and recently graduated from a WIT President’s PhD Scholarship Programme. The focus of her research was to quantify and assess plasma concentrations of the carotenoids, lutein and zeaxanthin. She investigated how they relate to health characteristics, lifestyle factors and disease in Irish adults. These nutrients are important as they have been found to enhance visual function in diseased and non-diseased eyes and reduce the risk of visual loss in, and progression of, age-related macular degeneration (AMD), the leading cause of blindness in adults over the age of 65.
The work was produced from The Irish Longitudinal Study on Aging (TILDA), which was designed to investigate the factors that influence healthy ageing. The study will provide the foundation to develop new policies in healthcare, the financial sector and communities in Ireland, and has the opportunity to implement innovative technology that will make ageing a better experience. A noteworthy message from much of Rachel’s research is the appropriateness of introducing a screening programme for non-advanced AMD in the Republic of Ireland and the potential benefits of carotenoid supplementation in patients at risk of AMD.
Meanwhile, Dr Radhika Loomba completed her doctoral research in the fields of mobile sensing and mobile cloud computing at the Telecommunications Software & Systems Group (TSSG) in WIT. She was funded by the Irish Research Council Enterprise Partnership Scheme, and co-funded by Intel Labs Europe.
Dr Loomba’s research at TSSG at WIT was motivated by the proliferation of smartphones, tablets, wearables and other smart devices, as the world increasingly focuses on always being connected with the advent of IoT. Each of these devices has several embedded sensors and these applications have quickly become part of the everyday lifestyle of the user, for example, when tracking environmental factors like temperature. However, as more mobile applications are installed by the user, their performance and interaction is restricted by the available battery and resources of the mobile device. Additionally, most of these applications increasingly use continuous sensing, which has been known to reduce device standby time from 20 hours to 6 hours.
Dr Loomba’s doctoral research focused on the design and execution of a novel framework that readily supports collaborative sensing amongst devices, as well as implementing algorithms to alter the rate of sensing in mobile devices based on the context surrounding the user. The framework of the study successfully reduced the battery consumed during sensing, data collection and dissemination, as well as reducing the volume of sensed data collected, whilst maintaining accuracy and privacy of the mobile device user.