Category: Design and innovation

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.

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.

The Research Partners Group: A year on

By Alex Taylor, Research Partners Group member

“I would recommend highly [the RPG] to other researchers” – Researcher quote 15/08/2019

Just over a year ago my colleague and fellow lay member John Norton wrote a blog post introducing the newly-created Research Partners Group (RPG): An insider’s view of patient and public involvement. We’re a diverse group of 11 patients, carers and members of the public brought together by the Imperial Patient Safety Translational Research Centre (PSTRC). We were set up to help review research projects and researchers’ plans for involving people like us in their work.

Well, here we are just over one year later, and we have been very busy!

Launching the NHS Digital Academy

By Rachel Dunscombe, CEO, NHS Digital Academy

Standing in the Royal Society on the 16th of April waiting for the participants to arrive was both surreal and exciting. Surreal because of the rapid journey our wonderful team had taken to make the programme happen – this had become a reality so quickly. Exciting because I couldn’t wait to get started – this programme is important for the system and for me something I am hugely committed to.

The Digital Academy operational team, of which I am a part, are all keen to ensure that this programme is as grounded in digital leaders’ practice as much as possible rather than being too high end academic.