Senior Lecturer, Faculty of ICT
Dr Conrad Attard is a Lecturer and Researcher at the Department of Computer Information Systems within the Faculty of ICT at the University of Malta. He obtained his PhD at the University of Sheffield, UK, Faculty of Engineering, Computer Science Department. His research interests are smart technology, enterprise applications, crowdsourcing Just in Time knowledge at workplace, designing applications for mobile devices, eHealth and persuasive technology.
His research is focused on organisations in particular on the use of Smart technology, Just in time knowledge creation and eHealth solutions at the workplace. In the last years, he managed various research projects such as reporting tools that can support caregivers of wandering patients suffering from dementia. In this research, a tool that utilizes the currently available Smart Mobile Technologies was designed focusing on the patient’s’ wandering patterns whilst identifying any possible dangers pertaining to the patient.
He is the principal investigator of Pervasive Electronic Monitoring (PEM) in health care currently being carried out at the St Vincent de Paule Residence, which is a nursing home and hospital for the Elderly in collaboration with the University of Malta. The research group is multi disciplinary involving medical doctors, caregivers, nurses, occupational therapists, physiotherapists, building designers and ICT practitioners. His work involves the design of simulators that make use of Human Activity Recognition (HAR) that address the problem of incomplete data, collected from wearable devices. Creating a human activity datasets that can be used for research for specific case studies. The aim of this work is to help researchers and ICT practitioners working on hospital systems to improve the designs and the requirements, providing solutions to the relevant problems particularly addressing usability and trust in healthcare solutions.
This project was recently supported by University of Malta Research Innovation and Development Trust (RIDT) and Information Systems limited.
Dr. Attard initiated a project referred to as Create Access Present and Share (CAPS ACT) that brings various hospital experts and ICT companies together to better improve the hospital digitalisation process to allow management to access in real time hospital information from all levels including Mater Dei Hospital and St Vincent de Paule as case studies.
In 2010, Dr Attard joined IEEE Region 8 committee as a professional officer and in 2013 was appointed as Science and Technology PR Officer. Recently became the vice-chair of IEEE Malta Section. He is local coordinator of IEEE Malta section TISP and various science projects through TechLAB. Dr Attard is currently the Chair 2017 -2019 for IEEE.
Selected Publications:
- Attard, C., Mountain, G. & Romano, D.M. (2017). JUST IN TIME COLLABORATIVE PROBLEM SOLVING using SMART MOBILE DEVICES AT THE WORKPLACE International Conference on Internet of Things, Data and Cloud Computing (ICC 2017) ACM – International Conference Proceedings Series (ICPS) and will be available in ACM Digital Library. ISBN: 978-1-4503-4774-7
- Attard, C., Mountain, G. & Romano, D.M. (2016). Problem Solving, Confidence and Frustration when carrying out familiar tasks on a unfamiliar mobile Device. Computers in Human Behavior, Elsevier, Volume 61,Pages 300–312.