What themes would you like to see in future competitions? We expect to launch our next competition in the autumn and with plans to release calls every 6 months we would like your input regarding technology challenges that you would like to see included. We are keen to hear from industry so please email your ideas to sbri@lgcgroup.com. See below for a list of categories included up to this point.
Previous themes have included:
Keeping Children Active:
- Motivating children at risk of obesity to take more exercise
- Monitoring the amount of exercise that children are taking and encouraging them to be more active
Managing Long Term Conditions:
- Remote monitoring of patients combined with decision support to enable better care from home
- Innovative solutions to data and systems management with relation to patient care
Patient safety:
- Better patient monitoring, accurate transfer and interpretation of data to determine correct treatment
- Designing in best practice
- Elimination of calculation errors in medication
Long Term Conditions:
- Delivery of care closer to home and in the home
- The empowerment of people to take greater control and responsibility of their health and care
Medicines Management:
- Helping patients to get the best from their medicines and thereby delivering real improvements in health
- Developing innovative medicines management approaches that have the patient’s needs uppermost while improving service efficiency and reducing waste
- Providing convenient access to a range of medicines management services in different environments through multi-disciplinary working, which builds on the strength of pharmacists
Improving experience for people at the end of their life:
- Pain management devices giving the required comfort levels whilst maintaining the ability to communicate needs and maintain awareness of those from whom they draw comfort;
- New therapeutic or device related solutions to alleviate other non-pain symptoms;
- Monitoring technologies designed for use in the patients’ own home or in a care home environment to reduce the feelings of isolation or anxiety of over-medicalised acute care settings;
- Communication tools designed to facilitate planning, implementation and transfer of information between patients, carers and providers of care.
Mental Health – a focus on health technology:
- Screening tools that enable more predictive and earlier diagnosis;
- Monitoring devices to identify a change in condition enabling early intervention;
- Communication tools that enable information about health to be shared online, put people in touch with others in similar positions or keep people in touch with healthcare professionals – for example, texting reminders of appointments;
- Tools that can make services more accessible and offer a less stigmatising way of accessing support;
- Tools to assist in treatment planning across agencies.
Improving Diagnosis and Treatment Management of Cancer:
- Stratification of cancer
- Early detection of cancer
- Blood test & treatment logistics
- Patient-led coordination of follow up care
- Moving follow up care out to primary care
- Prevention of lost time spent waiting
Improving outcomes for patients with Cardiovascular Disease:
- Manage CVD as a single family of diseases
- Improving and enhancing case finding in primary care and better identification of very high risk families/individuals
- Better early management and secondary prevention in the community
Improving outcomes of patients with COPD through better long term and self-management of the disease:
- Respiratory failure
- Activity
- Medicines Optimisation
- Exacerbations
- Diagnosis
Better outcomes for people with Diabetes:
- Early detection
- Information transfer
- Reducing routine HCP contact
- Lifestyle and condition management
Mental Health – A Focus on Health Technology:
- Making treatment or care more accessible and patient-centred by reducing the need for routine clinic-based appointments and face to face consultation (e.g. using virtual coaches, educational games, avatar therapy, video-consultation).
- Ways of helping older people/people with dementia to access normal experiences (e.g. using virtual reality to increase access to arts and sports participation, or getting exposure to horticulture; allowing people with dementia to safely leave the home, go for walks, access public transport etc).
- Ways of reducing isolation for older people/people with dementia (e.g. secure social networking, robotic therapeutic pets).
- Ways of using mobile technology to improve engagement, information provision and acceptability of mental health services for hard to reach groups (e.g. adolescents and young people, offenders and ‘looked after’ populations, substance users).
- Increasing objectivity and reliability of diagnostic assessment and sensitivity of treatment monitoring, enhancing early detection to prevent relapse and reduce risk (e.g. computerised assessments, machine learning algorithms, wearable devices and biosensors).
- Ways of supporting adherence with medication.
Patient Safety & Patient Monitoring:
- Linkage to existing patient data
- Tools to assist decision making (software)
- Monitoring the effectiveness of interventions in real time in acute and rapidly deteriorating chronic conditions
- Monitoring of patients vital functions and condition (ideally in real time) and patient self-rating systems
Diagnostic and Research Tools:
- Pharmacogenomics/Companion diagnostics
- Point-of-Care and handheld diagnostic platforms/instruments
- Continuous monitoring
- Biomarkers
- Analytical Tools
- Patient and Public Involvement (PPI)
There have also been other health-related SBRI competitions with themes such as Pathogen Detection; Hand Hygiene; Dementia; Stroke; Hospital Admissions; Behaviour Changes; Kidney Care; and Genomics.