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Launching our IHE Annual Report 2022
17 January 2023
We are delighted to share with you a snapshot of what we’ve been up to over the last 12 months. The world of healthcare engineering has been busy and we’ve been working on a great many things.
This past year saw a very welcome return to in-person events. It has been wonderful to reconnect with colleagues, and for early-career researchers and students to have new opportunities to present their work and network.
This is something we’re very big on – creating opportunities for the next generation of healthcare engineers. This year saw the second round of IHE Summer Studentship scheme, spearheaded by our Education Delivery Group, which allows undergraduate engineering students to spend eight weeks working on a research project inside a hospital. We aim to expand this scheme in future years.
In October 2022, we welcomed the third cohort to our IHE Impact Fellowship scheme, a year-long programme that trains UCL researchers in a range of engagement and impact topics, including co-production, policy engagement, media engage and science communication. Over the course of the scheme, Fellows develop their skills through personalised training, expert mentorship, and practical opportunities. Head to the ‘Engagement’ section to read about the impactful projects our alumni have already delivered!
We’ve continued to prioritise our work on technologies to support healthy ageing. From November 2021 to January 2022, we held ‘Tomorrow’s Home: 2050’, an immersive installation at the Museum of the Home in Hoxton. The exhibition explored how our homes could be designed to help us live independently as we grow older, and also support our changing planet.
It’s been two years since we launched our Age Innovation Hub – a digital platform that crowdsourced ideas and needs for technologies to support healthy ageing from a diverse set of end-users, from healthcare professionals to carers to patients and their families. The insights gathered from this project have fed into our healthy ageing strategy, making sure that we focus on delivering usable solutions to real problems.
This project directly shaped our Healthy Ageing Challenge Awards which launched this year. The awards provided four research projects with £10,000 each to develop new healthcare technologies that address challenges in healthy ageing. Along the way, the project teams will be supported by experts in co-production and responsible innovation, to ensure their innovative solutions are developed in collaboration with their intended end-users. At the end of the award period, the projects will take part in a Dragon’s Den competition where the successful team will receive a further £50,000 – so watch this space!
Read on to find out all about these activities and more. Next year we will be moving on to tackle our other strategic priority themes and we would love to have you involved.
