2020-21 Decisions, Assessment, Risk and Evidence Studies Seminar Series

Older people, their families, and health and social care professionals need to communicate effectively about risks in order to provide optimal care for the older person living at home.

A particular risk in older age is falling.

This talk will present the first findings from a PhD project where various machine learning algorithms have been applied to health and social care data in order to identify risk factors that correlate with the risk of falling amongst older people.

Algorithms that provide the best classification accuracy and which could potentially be used to inform care of older people will be highlighted together with methods of visualising these risks.

Leeanne Lindsay is a final year PhD student undertaking an interdisciplinary study combining both Social Science and Computer Science at Ulster University.

Prior to this, Leeanne studied Information Technology at Magee and graduated with a First-Class Honours in 2017. In our ever-changing, fast-paced digital environment, Leeanne has a keen interest in integrating Computer Science with Health and Social Sciences, particularly in relation to measuring and communicating risks so as to inform the daily decision-making processes of health and social care professionals.

In order to enhance the interactive nature of this session, the email addresses of participants will be used to invite you to respond to some online questions about the visualisation methods presented.

Also, the Zoom session will be recorded.

These are so that the presenter can use the comments of participants as part of her PhD study.

This seminar is part of the DARES Seminar Series 2021.

The second seminar will be Thursday 04 March 2021 and is entitled:

• Standardised assessment or individualised discretion?: A Grounded Professional Judgement approach by Danielle Turney, Professor of Social Work, Queen’s University Belfast.

The November session will be by Zoom.

The March session will be by Zoom or in person on the Jordanstown campus.

• 10.30am start, finishing 12.00noon
• 45 minutes presentation and 45 minutes discussion.