Category: Design and innovation

Playing with nature and technology for innovative children’s hospice care

By Ivor Williams, Senior Design Associate

Every day, around 360,000 babies are born around the world. Most will lead long, healthy lives into adulthood. Sadly, a minority experience a very short life due to illness or live with a long-term or life-limiting disease. For these children, palliative care can transform their experience, helping them live with a greater quality of life, while also supporting their family and friends.

Palliative care is an active and total approach to care, from the point of diagnosis, throughout the child’s life, to death and beyond. As a holistic care it embraces physical, emotional, social and spiritual elements and focuses on improving the quality of life of everyone involved.

How robots in space could lead to better healthcare on Earth

Working in space comes with its fair share of challenges, to put it lightly. There’s the lack of gravity, extreme temperatures, intense cosmic radiation, delays in communication, clunky space suits, to name just a few things that astronauts contend with.

This complex environment means that tasks we would consider straightforward back on planet Earth, such as gripping and manipulating objects, are surprisingly difficult and time-consuming to accomplish. As humans continue to ramp-up their space exploration endeavours, attempting more daring feats and travelling deeper than ever before, scientists need to address these obstacles for future missions to be successful.

One potential helping hand could come in the form of robots.

Putting people at the heart of dementia research

All around us, technology is making our lives easier. Google Maps has allowed us to ditch the A-Z; apps can bring you everything from takeaways to taxis; Alexa won’t let you forget your anniversary again; the World Wide Web is your never-ending guide to everything on this planet and beyond; the list is seemingly endless.

Yet while many of us may be most familiar with the convenience and shortcuts that everyday technology bestows us, its potential to positively impact our lives stretches far beyond this. Arguably one of technology’s greatest assets is that it is an enabler, allowing ordinary people to do more.

How wearables could help tackle sepsis

Our immune system serves to protect our bodies from threats, such as rogue cells that could turn cancerous, or infections that could harm our health. But the immune system can also go wrong, and do more harm than good.

This is what happens in sepsis, or “blood poisoning”, where the immune system goes into overdrive while attempting to clear an invader, such as harmful bacteria, and inadvertently attacks person’s tissues and organs. This life-threatening reaction is estimated to affect close to 150,000 people each year in the UK alone.

World Sepsis Day, on September 13th, seeks to raise awareness of this serious condition, which could take as many as 6 million lives across the globe each year.

What’s co-production in research?

Imagine this hypothetical scenario: a group of researchers are working on novel ways to detect early warning signs that a patient’s condition is getting worse. They think a wearable device that automatically alerts both patients and healthcare professionals to potential problems would be an innovative solution to enable earlier detection.

What’s co-production in research?

Imagine this hypothetical scenario: a group of researchers are working on novel ways to detect early warning signs that a patient’s condition is getting worse. They think a wearable device that automatically alerts both patients and healthcare professionals to potential problems would be an innovative solution to enable earlier detection.

So the team members put their heads together and come up with a new wearable sensor that they think would greatly benefit patients and professionals alike. But when they test it with patients for the first time, they don’t get the feedback they’d hoped for. Users find it awkward, difficult to set up, clunky and uncomfortable.

Our Co-production Journey: From Sandpits to Bird Boxes

By Anna Lawrence-Jones (co-written with Jean Straus).

This article originally appeared on the UCL Public Engagement blog and has been reposted with permission. Visit the blog to read more about the UCL Centre for Co-Production in Health Research. 

In my former job at Cancer Research UK, I organised Sandpit Innovation Workshops that brought together researchers, healthcare professionals and innovative thinkers to come up with novel research ideas to help solve a health challenge. Normally a three-day event, sandpits are a way to generate research ideas – which are inevitably more innovative and daring in this spontaneous environment – and get them funded quickly.

On entrepreneurship and seizing opportunities to make healthcare safer

By Ana Luisa Neves, co-founder of momoby, GP and IGHI Research Fellow. 

At momoby, we believe every woman should have access to prenatal care, regardless of where she lives. To tackle this challenge, we’re developing a low cost, pocket-sized device that tests for diseases that could harm pregnancy, using a single drop of blood.

Celebrating our women at IGHI

It’s Women at Imperial Week, an opportunity for us to celebrate some of the fantastic females who help keep our Institute brimming with brilliance.

To mark the occasion, in honour of International Women’s Day, we spoke with a handful of women from across IGHI’s Centres to learn more about what they do, what makes them tick, and the females who inspire them the most.