Join us on Friday 13 February, 2026 at Google HQ, London for Connect: the annual event from Health Research from Home where you can shape the future of health research using smartphones and wearables. 

 We are gathering the brightest minds in academia, industry and public/patient contributors for an unmissable interactive and exciting one day event. From informative keynote talks to showcases about leading technology and current research projects, we are providing unique opportunities for networking, along with inspiration for your own research ideas. 

You can expect: 

• Two keynote lectures given by world-leading experts in the use of smartphones and wearables for health research. 

• An update from Government about the 10 Year Plan and the role of smartphones and wearables 

• A technology showcase to explore how to unlock the value of smartphone sensors. 

• Updates of what’s been happening in Health Research from Home and exciting upcoming opportunities. 

• Stories and insights from our public contributors, showing how their experiences have shaped Health Research from Home. 

• A thought-provoking research showcase where delegates compete for the prestigious Ken Rothman Award. 

Who is Connect for? 

• Academics working in health research using smartphones and wearables. 

• Industry leaders in wearables and smartphone applications. 

• Industries in health research. 

• International Regulatory Bodies 
• People living with long-term health conditions who are interested or involved in health research using smartphones and wearables. 

About

• Cross-Sector Networking
• Co-Creation
• Inspirational Speakers
• Technology Showcase

Health Research from Home (HRfH) has been funded by the Medical Research Council (UKRI MRC) to build a cross-sector community and share know-how and skills.

2026 Agenda

9:00 Registration
10:00 Introduction to Health Research from Home – Will Dixon
10:10 Living with a long-term condition, and how that shapes health research from home – Margaret Parkinson & Leila Hamrang, Public contributors
10:30 Digital in the NHS 10 Year Plan – Will Warburton, Director of Life Sciences Policy at NHS England
10:45 Keynote lecture 1 –  Beyond Steps: Unlocking Multimodal Health Discovery with the
World’s Largest Wearable Dataset –  Josh Denny, All of Us Research Programme
11:25 Break
11:55 ‘Invisible posters’ networking session
12:50 Lunch
13:40 News and announcements from Health Research from Home
13:55 Technology showcase – Michael Sinclair (University of Glasgow); Francesca Cormack & Nick Taptiklis (Cambridge Cognition); Matthew Thompson (Google)

15:00 Break
15:30 Research showcase for the Ken Rothman Award
16:30 Break
16:40 Keynote lecture 2: Wearables at Scale: Technical progress and practical barriers for measuring physical activity in national population health surveillance – Fiona Bull, World Health Organisation 
17:20 Ken Rothman Award prize giving
17:30 End – optional drinks reception

About the speakers

Public contributors

Margaret Parkinson

Margaret has lived with mental illness for most of her adult life. She is very passionate about research which helps those who are going through mental illness and works as part of the CONNECT study research team in Edinburgh as an expert by experience. The CONNECT study aims to detect relapse of psychosis using digital tools. Margaret believes that involving patients is crucial for grounding research and that when researchers and people with mental health difficulties are working together in a research team, it changes lives.

Leila Hamrang

Leila is an experienced patient advocate with active involvement in research and PPIE from project inception. A survivor of leukaemia and a bone marrow transplant 24 years ago, she brings valuable lived experience and a strong commitment to ensuring patient perspectives influence research design and delivery. She works with research teams to review materials for clarity, accessibility and patient acceptability, and advocates for ethical data use and co-design. Leila holds a particular interest in how wearable technologies can support health monitoring, enhance patient experience and improve long-term outcomes

Digital in the NHS 10 Year Plan – Will Warburton

Will is the Director of Life Sciences Policy and Strategy at NHS England, supporting the NHS, industry, patients and partners across the innovation ecosystem to collaborate to improve health and healthcare.

Will was previously Managing Director of the Shelford Group, a collaboration of 10 teaching and research NHS trusts, and Director of Improvement at the Health Foundation, where he led a commissioning and funding programme to build knowledge of how to deliver effective improvement and innovation in the NHS.

Keynote speakers

Josh Denny

Dr. Josh Denny, M.D., M.S., is the Chief Executive Officer of the National Institutes of Health’s All of Us Research Program, a nationwide health research program that has already enrolled more than 860,000 participants. All of Us has created one of the world’s largest biomedical data sets that more than 18,000 researchers use to improve medical care through personalized insights and scientific discovery. Dr. Denny, who was named CEO in January 2020, led the program’s initial prototyping project and the All of Us Data and Research Center.

Prior to joining NIH, Dr. Denny held leadership positions at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, where he pioneered the use of electronic health records for genomics studies, including phenome-wide association studies and clinical pharmacogenomics. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, the American Society for Clinical Investigation, and a fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics. Dr. Denny has authored over 400 peer-reviewed publications.

Fiona Bull

Fiona is an internationally recognised public health leader with over 30 years of experience spanning academia, government, and global health organisations in the UK, USA, Australia, and currently with the World Health Organization (WHO). Her career has focused on preventing noncommunicable diseases (NCDs), promoting health, and advancing the role of physical activity in improving population wellbeing. Since joining WHO in 2017, she has led the global agenda on physical activity, working to strengthen national policies, global guidance, and surveillance systems.

She led the development of the WHO Global Action Plan on Physical Activity (2018–2030) and has authored multiple WHO guidance documents supporting countries to design and scale effective interventions. She is known for building multisectoral partnerships across health, transport, sport, and urban planning to embed physical activity within sustainable development agendas. With a background in public health, exercise science, and policy, she has published over 250 papers, secured $24M+ in research funding, and is a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher (2020, 2022–2024; H-index 73).

She previously served as President of the International Society for Physical Activity and Health, leading major global advocacy initiatives, and was appointed MBE in 2014 for services to public health.

Technology showcase

Matthew Thompson – Google

Matthew is an academic GP who has spent about half his career in the UK and half in the US, combining clinical practice as a GP/Family Physician, with research, and teaching. Much of his research has involved understanding use of new technologies in primary care settings, as well as child health, cancer detection, and cardiovascular disease. He moved to Google just over 3 years ago, where he conducts clinical research on new health sensing features on wearables, phones and earbuds, and increasingly Gen AI products for consumers and health practitioners.

Michael Sinclair – The University of Glasgow

Dr Michael Sinclair is a Lecturer in Urban Analytics at the University of Glasgow and Urban Big Data Centre. With a background in Human Geography and Environmental Science, his research sits at the intersection of the growing availability of novel data sources and their application to social and environmental challenges for societal benefit.

He is particularly interested in advancing knowledge on the potential, challenges, and ethics of user-generated data and the methods used to analyse them. A key focus of his work is leveraging these new data sources to understand human-nature interactions at scale.

Nick Taptiklis – Cambridge Cognition

Nick Taptiklis is Head of Research and Development at Cambridge Cognition, where he leads scientific and technical innovation in digital cognitive assessment. He directs cross-disciplinary work deploying smartphone, wearable, and voice-based technologies enhanced by machine learning and artificial intelligence to generate sensitive, scalable digital biomarkers for large-scale studies of brain health, cognition, fatigue, and sleep. Nick is involved in several major international research collaborations, including IDEA-FAST, an IHI-funded public–private consortium developing digital measures of fatigue, sleep disturbance, and daily functioning across neurodegenerative and immune-mediated diseases, and AD-RIDDLE, which aims to implement and evaluate a modular digital and blood-biomarker toolbox for early detection and precision prevention of Alzheimer’s disease in real-world healthcare settings.

Highlights of HRfH Connect 2025

Co-Design at the Core

Our Co-Design workshop was one of the highlights of HRfH Connect. We identified a real problem facing our community and then asked thinkpublic to create a collaborative workshop so delegates could help us find answers.

We brought academics, industry and members of the public together, as only through combining their individual insights can we create life-changing research. A huge thank you to Haleon for sponsoring this workshop.

The Ken Rothman Award

We invited 14 talented researchers to share their work in front of some of the biggest names in health research using smartphones and wearables.

Congratulations to Michele Orini from Kings College London who won our audience vote for his presentation and received an Oura Ring for his efforts.

It was the hugely impressive Humphrey Curtis and Timothy Neate, also from Kings College London, who took home The Ken Rothman Award. Their presentation on ‘Co-designed Wearable and Discreet Communication Technologies For People with Aphasia’ was a brilliant demonstration of how research using smartphones and wearables has the power to transform lives.

Inspirational Speakers

The diversity of the HRfH Connect speakers reflected the diversity of people needed to create world-leading research. Thank you to Professor Aiden Doherty and Professor Claire Steves, it was so inspirational for our delegates to hear about the huge impact their work has made in the UK and around the world.

Thank you also to Dr Mary De Silva, her unique perspective on health research from the government’s point of view demonstrated the potential and impact research can have on our daily lives.

A final, and very special thank you, to Max Carlish and Seb Tucknott who spoke so eloquently about living with their long-term health conditions. Hearing about the challenges they face, and how technology could help them manage their conditions, put the whole event into perspective.

Latest Technology

Industry is the third pillar in a collaborative approach to health research using smartphones and wearables. We were thrilled that Fitbit/Google, Oura, uMotif and RADAR-Base agreed to participate in a technology showcase.

Through their presentations they showed what their technology is capable of and how it can be applied to research. They shared examples of successful collaboration with researchers and the public. They also offered the room a glimpse into the future and the possibilities that technology currently in development may bring.

Gallery

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