Theo is a Reader at the School of Sport & Health Sciences and Assistant Director Outreach of the Centre for Secure, Intelligent and Usable Systems (CSIUS) at the University of Brighton.

He is Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (HEA), Editor in Chief of the British Journal of Anaesthetic and Recovery Nursing (BJARN) and a visiting researcher at the School of Nursing, Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

He is currently the Academic Lead of the Brighton and Hove Digital Health Living Lab, where citizens, health professionals and industry are working side by side on health innovation through co-creation. The project has been included in the National Initiative MADEatUNI, as one of the 100+ leading ways universities are saving lives and keeping the public healthy, creating healthier lifestyles and a fairer society.

Theo is an international scholar in the health sciences with h-index 10 and over 250 citations and his funding portfolio includes Horizon2020, Interreg2Seas, AHSN and AfPP. In 2015 he used the term ‘Digital Nursing’, to define a future workforce of health care practitioners with the special knowledge and skills to utilise digital technologies for patient and citizen benefit. As a recognition of his work, in 2018 he was named one of the Top 50 Healthcare IT leaders in Europe by the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS Europe), the largest health IT membership organisation in the world.

He is active member of international bodies and committees including the International Task Force for Technology Informatics Guiding Education Reform (TIGER HIMSS International), the Cybersecurity Privacy and Security committee (HIMMSS International) and the Phi Mu Chapter of the Sigma Theta Tau International Honor Society of Nursing.      

He has extensive experience of acting as evaluator for national and international funding bodies including EPSRC, NIHR, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and the Hong Kong Research Grants Council. In addition he acts as an external evaluator for Higher Education quality assurance organisations, including the National Commission for Academic Accreditation and Assessment (NCAAA) of Saudi Arabia and the Commission for Academic Accreditation (CAA) of United Arab Emirates.   

Theo is an advocate of research dissemination through different media and has outputs on YouTube1, Youtube2, Youtube3, Vimeo, Twitter, Researchgate and HiMSSTV

Digital Health technologies are promising to have a profound effect on how health services are delivered, allowing people to manage their health more effectively, providing effective ways of diagnosing disease, monitoring the impact of policies on population health, resulting in improved accessibility, affordability, and quality of health care. Still, the introduction of these technologies comes with challenges and experience resistance and slow adaptation.

Theo’s specialising on Digital Nursing and Digital Health.

His research interests lie in the intersection of Health Care and Digital Technologies and his focus is on the field of co-producing and evaluating Digital Health Technologies through Digital Health Living Labs and accelerating innovation.

In particular, his research focuses on the following areas:

• Digital Health Living Labs. The work in this area is concerned with the development of Living Labs as ecosystems of open innovation through co-production with citizens.

• Evaluation of Digital Health Technologies. I am interested in developing new approaches and tools for the trialing and evaluating new technologies such as wearables and sensors and their use as health care tools.

• Digital Ready Healthcare Workforce. Based on the Digital Nursing term I coined in 2015, the aim of the work is to utilise the Living Labs as spaces for undergraduate and postgraduate health care students to work side by side with citizens on developing innovation skills and conduct research.

• IoT, Cyber-Physical, and Cloud Computing Security in Health Care. I am interested in exploring the role of the end-users as vulnerable actors in security attacks, threat discovery and response, and their educational requirements.        

Recent and ongoing projects include:

• EMPOWERCARE involving 13 cross border European partners. It is part of the Interreg VA 2Seas Mers Zeeën and has been awarded more than 4 million euros in funding by the European Regional Development Fund. The project involves partners coming together to co-create and test social innovations and digital health solutions to make local services more efficient and effective to address societal challenges in the 2Seas area.
• Digital Health Living Lab, initiated at Leach Court and expanded in more areas in Brighton. Living Labs offer an arena for developing and testing prototypes or more mature digital health products and services, through co-production with citizens, that have the potential to improve welfare services, reduce financial pressure to public sector services and to enable healthy living as a whole. The project was funded by the KSS AHSN Darzi Fellowships.
• the development of a Living Lab situated at The Bevy, aiming to explore and tackle social isolation and loneliness. The partnership will build on the experience of the Bevy in starting to tackle loneliness through different community initiatives and the university’s experience of the Brighton and Hove Digital Health Living Lab. It will enable the Living Lab to innovate from a domestic space – working with older people in sheltered accommodation – to also being located in a quintessentially British public space – the local pub. The project was funded by the UoB Community University Partnership Programme (CUPP)
• INNOVATEDIGNITY-ITN project led by Professor Kathleen Galvin where I am a member of the supervisory team. The purpose of INNOVATEDIGNITY-ITN funded by the European Commission (2019–2023) is to develop a shared research and training agenda in order to educate the next generation of interdisciplinary health care researchers and care leaders across Europe. The project is a response to the Europe wide need to provide sustainable and dignified care for older people at home and in residential, municipal and hospital settings.

I supervise students doing research in Digital Health, Coproduction of science and technology in the community, Privacy and Cybersecurity in Healthcare, Technology Assessment, consumer health technologies (IoT, wearables, Sensors, apps), user-technology relations, User-led Innovation.

I'm happy to work with prospective PhD students to develop research proposals.

I am the Module Lead for the masters level NA7159- Digital Technologies and Information for Health Care Delivery and I also teach Digital Health at the undergraduate curriculum.