CATCH PhD student presents research at NHS Mental Health Services conference in Bristol

Matthew Bennion, CATCH PhD student attended the Facilitating Digital Innovations for NHS Mental Health Services conference in Bristol, 18th May 2017 and presented his recent research around E-therapy usage in the English NHS.

NHS Test Beds announced

Older patients and people with long term conditions and mental health problems will be among the first to benefit from a major new drive to modernise how the NHS delivers care.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, NHS England Chief Executive Simon Stevens launched the first wave of NHS Innovation ‘Test Beds’.

These collaborations between the NHS and innovators – including Verily (formerly Google Life Sciences), IBM and Philips – aim to harness technology to address some of the most complex issues facing patients and the health service.

Frontline health and care workers in seven areas will pioneer and evaluate the use of novel combinations of interconnected devices such as wearable monitors, data analysis and ways of working which will help patients stay well and monitor their conditions themselves at home.

Successful innovations will then be available for other parts of the country to adopt and adapt to the particular needs of their local populations.

Sites are:

 

North East London

Heywood, Middleton and Rochdale

Lancashire and Cumbria

Sheffield City Region

Birmingham and Solihull

West of England

Surrey and Borders

Please click here to find out more.

Place based systems of care

Have you heard of these?
Are you interested in how place based systems of care could improve health and health care?

A recent King's Fund report entitled "Place-based systems of care: A way forward for NHS and England" discusses just this.

The report can be downloaded here.

CATCH researchers take their work to the community in Vancouver

Professor Arlene Astell discusses evaluation
concepts with the AAL-WELL team.

Myself (Tim Gomersall) and Professor Arlene Astell returned this week from a successful final meeting of the steering group for the AAL-WELL study in Vancouver, Canada. AAL-WELL is a study about the potential for the new class of so-called ‘ambient assisted living’ (AAL) systems to support older people to maintain everyday activities and meaningful social roles, and our group brings together software engineers, psychologists, occupational therapists, and social scientists to examine the issues from multiple perspectives.

In the meeting, we discussed several key issues about AAL that have yet to be addressed in the research literature. Our colleagues from the Karolinska Institutet (Sweden) spoke about the activities and social roles older people want to master in everyday life, the technologists from Toronto brought their insights on user-centred design along, and the Vancouver-based social scientists and modellers discussed the ethical issues around AAL. For our own part, Professor Astell and I led a discussion about current controversies in evaluation theories and methods for AAL. Evaluation approaches for these technologies are in their infancy, but it is crucial to have a sound basis for understanding their value if we are to gain the promised benefits of the AAL revolution – and we certainly had some lively discussions on how we each understood evaluation from our varied research perspectives!

We didn’t just talk among ourselves while we were in Vancouver. On the fourth day of the meeting, we led a knowledge café in which we presented our research ideas to a residential community of older adults living just outside the city boundaries. This was an especially valuable part of the experience – not only did we get a chance to take some of our ideas out into the wider world, we also got some interesting feedback on them from a community group. In fact, a lot of our assumptions were upended by their comments – for example, it is often said that AAL will help people to live independently, but the residents spoke about the concerns they would have about becoming dependent on technologies, and the problems this would cause if the technologies broke down or became unreliable. If ever there was a clear illustration of how important it is to include the views of older adults when considering how best to support them, this was it.

We were privileged to have met with such great colleagues and participants in this beautiful, rainy, lively city – our discussions framed by views over the Pacific and the sweeping forests and mountainsides of British Columbia. And now, we can’t wait to tell you more about our next research outputs from the study. Watch this space…

Urgent and Emergency Care Event

King's Fund event happening soon!


When? 22nd September, 2015 9am-4.50pm
Where? King's Fund, London, W1G 0AN

Want to find out more? Click here.

Technology and Disability - special edition available now!

Dr Peter Cudd (lead editor), Simon Judge and Donna Cowan put together a special issue of the journal "Technology and Disability", which was dedicated to the RAATE 2013 conference that Simon is involved in organising. The editorial discusses the development  of the conference related to assistive technology research and practice over the past 10 years.

Journal Edition available here.

Editorial (open access) available here.

Mental eHealth care: hype or reality? Minddistrict at EHI Live 2014

This year’s EHI Live 2014 had a lot of excellent seminars on offer. Fennie Wiepkema from Minddistrict gave a thought-provoking seminar on the topic of a key area of my research – mental eHealth.

A summary of the seminar, along with some additional points from Mind District’s ‘Smart Interventions’ white paper are detailed below.

The NHS and mental eHealth
On the 25th of September 2014 the Mental Health Network NHS Confederation published a paper discussing the future of mental health and digital technology. The paper detailed how patients are increasingly using digital technology and as a result their expectations are changing. Patients want more insight into their treatment, more transparency and actively want to take part in their treatment. As a result of this the NHS is now focused on modernising mental health in accordance with patient expectations by investigating the feasibility of integrating mental eHealth into their health services.

To continue reading please click here. 

Authored by Matthew Bennion
Proof Read by Jacob Andrews and David Clayton

24hr Design Challenge

24 hours of continuous work (well, maybe with a short break) is hard work.

As a facilitator, I had the luxury of watching the whole event unfold without having to dive in and do the tough job of creating a meaningful piece of Participatory Design over a single day.

Genuine Participatory Design - where everyone involved can have a meaningful impact on the outcome - requires mutual learning. This means that everyone involved in the process learns something from the other people taking part. For the designers, this meant learning something from the lived experience of the Design Partners who live with Parkinson's; and for the people living with Parkinson's (along with clinicians and their professional experience) they see how the design process can move rapidly to propose a 'new future'.

The event was a great success, and I would very much like to thank all who took part in the challenge - without whom none of the excellent work shown below would have even happened!

Thanks also to Professor Julia Cassim of the Kyoto Design Lab for co-facilitating the event. This event was a collaboration between Lab 4 Living (at Sheffield Hallam University Art & Design Research Centre) and the Kyoto Design Lab (at Kyoto Institute of Technology).

Team 1 - Pace

Emily Boniface, Peter MacQueen, Luke Davis, Ross Taylor, Sharon Kerr & Duncan Kerr (Design Partners), Kyoko Murata, Amina Pereno, Matt Simms, Sudhakar Nadkarni, Anuja Agarwal, Paula Howland (Clinician), and Ben Mortimer (Team Lead).

Freezing is a physical symptom experienced by some people living with Parkinson's. It often happens during a repetitive task (such as walking), and has been described as 'having your feet glued to the ground'. It causes considerable anxiety and is perceived as deeply stigmatising by those who experience it - as the effect is not well known or understood by the general population.

Team 1 came up with a low-cost concept to help manage Freezing - by taking a genuinely Inclusive approach to design they created a product that has applications beyond Parkinson's alone - the product is directly applicable to athletes. Team 1 created Pace - a personal metronome, easily configured by the user - with even the packaging and branding designed by the team in 24 hours. Part of the presentation included the video below.

Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhJNJ46Tk4c

Team 2 - SlowGo

Jessica Fox, Lynn Telford & Rick Telford (Design Partners), John Bateson (Team Lead), Igor Dydykin, Penny Tiffney, Nick Dulake, Lígia Lopes, Lee Credgington, and Sandy Walker (not pictured - Ragini Mohanty)

Team 2 took a markedly different direction from the other two teams, in that they designed an experience - a piece of service design that slowed the pace of certain activities. Slowness is one of the main symptoms of Parkinson's, and at a supermarket checkout, busy café, or airport security (to name a few examples) this causes significant anxiety and stigma. SlowGo is a service with a brand that is independent of supermarket providers, cafés and airport security operators - a service provider that is subscribed to by those operators to entice people who appreciate having a bit more time to complete these tasks.

 

SlowGo is inclusive - it benefits families with toddlers, people with disabilities, older people, or even just people who don't feel like rushing.

SlowGo won the JRI Orthopaedics Judge's award for the innovative approach shown over the 24hr Design Challenge.

 Team 3 - PulsePal

Charlotte MacRae, Thomas Fisher, Laura Malan, Valarie Carr (Team Lead), Hester van Zuthem, Heath Read, Claire Keeley (Clinician), Chris Iveson, Ali Finlayson, and Jane Finlayson (Design Partners)

 

Team 3 developed PulsePal, a hardware / software combination that aimed to improve the self-management of Freezing for those who live with Parkinson's. It is testament to the problem that freezing poses that two of the three teams competing chose to focus on it!

The hardware proposed by Team 3 included a technology to gently squeeze the wearer's arm (simulating a person's grip), as well as vibrate. The device pairs with a smartphone, allowing customisation of the vibration strength and frequency, as well as being able to record ancillary information about freezing incidents... to allow the wearer to sport patterns.

Team 3 won the Devices for Dignity People's Choice award - voted for by the delegates of the Design 4 Health conference.

Written by Dr Matt Dexter, Sheffield Hallam University