Professor Wendy Moyle, PhD, MHSc, BN, Dip App Sci, RN
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Professor Wendy Moyle is a Registered Nurse who specialises in the care of older people, particularly people with dementia and their carers.
Wendy is currently Program Director, Healthcare Practice and Survivorship (HPS), five research programs in the Menzies Health Institute Queensland, Griffith University. The HPS research program aims to improve the health and wellbeing of the Australian and international community by facilitating world-class discoveries that target the development of healthcare practice and survivorship. Wendy is also a Professor of Nursing in the School of Nursing and Midwifery. This school is ranked 1st in Australia and 2nd in the world by QS rankings.
Wendy’s research expertise is in the fields of dementia, depression, and delirium. Her research focuses on finding evidence for best practice in the care of older people, particularly those with dementia, and improving quality of life, and evidence for managing behavioural and psychological symptoms of dementia (BPSD) using controlled trials to test psychosocial interventions.
She has a keen interest in technologies, and, within the ‘Moyle social robotics laboratory’, she develops and evaluates assistive technologies and social robots. She works with a multidisciplinary team of researchers from Australia and internationally, mainly from the UK and Japan. Wendy conceptualised and led the first seminal pilot randomised controlled trial that investigated the effect of a social robot on emotional response in people living with dementia. Prior to this, the available studies were descriptive and did not provide quality evidence of the effect of social robots. She led the first extensive and most rigorous randomised controlled trial to date to explore a social robot’s effectiveness to reduce behavioural and psychological symptoms in dementia. This study has been ground-breaking in understanding the use of social robots and specifically in this population.
She has expanded and developed new methods in her research that have placed her at the cutting edge of social robotics exploration. The novel use and the quality of her work have been highly cited. Understanding the cost-effectiveness of social robots has influenced clinicians’ perceptions of this technology for clinical use. Data from her research has been shared to create a new health economic tool specifically for people with dementia. Understanding of the conceptual design of social robots has led to invitations to contribute to the development of new technologies, mainly in the UK and Japan.
She has received several awards in recognition of her teaching, supervision of higher degree students, and research. These include two International Women’s Day Awards (2016), an International Nurse Researcher Hall of Fame (Sigma Theta Tau) for her research and mentorship of others (2019), and two international awards from Robohub (2019) and Analytics Insight (2020) for her robotic research. In addition, her research features widely in the media with, to date, 15 television appearances and over 137 radio and social media interviews.
She is committed to improving aged care quality and was recently appointed to the QLD Health Aged Care Working Party to look at the aged care workforce. She holds honorary appointments at the University of Plymouth, UK; Northumbria University, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, UK; and Kaohsiung Medical University, Taiwan. Wendy has been a Deeble Institute Advisory Board Member since 2016 and an AHHA Board Member since 2020.
