In this editor’s view rarely do opportunities as good as this come along for aspiring digital health innovators working on early warning systems for infectious diseases: I-Sense, in UCL, has announced that applications are now open for the 2nd round of I-Sense Mobility Fellowships – designed to support incoming researchers from academia and industry to work with I-Sense.
They are currently inviting incoming fellowship proposals from academia and industry in the following areas – (more…)
UCL is delighted to invite you to join them at Wayra, London for their Prize and Tech Day on Tuesday 23rd February at 14.30-19.00 as part of the Rosalind Franklin Appathon- a national app competition to empower and recognise women as leaders in STEMM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths and Medicine).
This free event will include some short talks from the judges, UCL Provost Professor Michael Arthur and a very special guest talk from Rosalind Franklin’s sister, author and historian Professor Jenifer Glynn. We will then hear pitches from the app finalists. Winners will be announced by Baroness Martha Lane Fox (Founder of Lastminute.com), Andrew Eland (Director of Social Impact Engineering, Google) and Dame Athene Donald (Professor of Experimental Physics at the University of Cambridge). There will also be plenty of time for networking and a chance to try out some of the apps. More information can be found here .
Do join UCL in celebrating the breadth of digital talent here in the UK and the pioneering women behind some truly innovative and exciting apps by registering for the event here.
The must-do free digital health event of the next few weeks has to be to go to one of the four final dallas events, in which attendees will get to hear of all the important things that the programme has learned over the past three years. Surely that’s unmissable, or as the flier says, “free but priceless”!
The events are at:
Bookings for the first three of these can be made here, for Glasgow, here.
The Cardiff event is being run alongside the TSA International Technology Enabled Care Conference on 16th & 17th November, (and see our recent blog on this too), so you can combine the two.
The Glasgow event is part of the Scottish Digital Health & Care Week, that we also featured in a recent blog.
Another free-to-attend event with a particular focus on SMEs takes place on the evening of the 3rd December in City Hall, London: 21st Century London MedTech. Bookings, and more details, here.
Moving to paid events, albeit very cheaply priced because the Royal Society of Medicine is a charity, the Telemedicine Section of the RSM has four events now open to book:
Both the February and April events are now into their fourth years – and both are regular sellouts, so worth booking soon.
You might also want to hold the 19th May in your diaries for when the RSM & IET jointly run another conference that was previously a sellout: “the future of medicine; the doctor’s role in 2025”. This will be opened by George Freeman, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Life Sciences,and features a glittering array of experts who will be suggesting what we need to do now to deliver the health & care systems of the future. Bookings will open soon.
The 2nd UCL Festival for Digital Health is now set for 22 February to 4 March 2016 – more details here.
Planning ahead, the search for the best eHealth solution in 2016 developed by an EU SME has begun with the unveiling of the competition’s website and the ability to get mailed information as it emerges.
Good luck if you apply!
Hatching a new business idea? Interested in mobile and IoT innovation? Need to bring mobile technology and business know-how in to your organisation?
Or perhaps you just want to move your career on…
Stuart Revell has kindly drawn TTA’s attention to the Mobile Academy which sets up shop at UCL’s innovation hub in Shoreditch, London. This year’s CPD-certified annual course will run from the 1st October to 3rd December 2015 on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. Tutors (including Stuart) are extremely high quality, and give their time for free.
Looks to be a great opportunity. Registration is here.
Anyone interested in pursuing an education in health informatics or data science at UCL is invited to an open evening on 25th June from 4:30pm at 222 Euston Road, London. This is billed as an informal event with an opportunity to meet staff and students and to learn more about the work of the Centre for Health Informatics and Multiprofessional Education, the UCL Institute for Health Informatics and the Farr Institute.
The occasion will be the launch event for UCL’s new MSc in Data Science for Research in Health and Biomedicine. This programme is set to equip graduates for new careers in academia, healthcare organisations, pharmaceutical companies and consultancies dealing with Big Data. UCL will be working closely with NHS, research and commercial partners to deliver an innovative and practical programme that will give students real exposure to practical research in one of the top centres for data science in health and biomedicine.
Book your place here.
The following is a brief summary of a joint Royal Society of Medicine/Institute of Engineering & Technology event held at the Academy of Medical Sciences on 6th May. The event was organised, extremely professionally, by the IET events team. The last ticket was sold half an hour before the start, so it was a genuine sell-out.
The speakers for the event were jointly chosen by this editor and by Prof Bill Nailon, who leads the Radiotherapy Physics, Image Analysis and Cancer Informatics Group at the Department of Oncology Physics, Edinburgh and is also a practising radiological consultant. As more of those invited by Prof Nailon were available than those invited by this editor, the day naturally ended up with a strong focus on advances in the many aspects of radiology as applied to imaging & treating cancer, as a surrogate for the wider examination of how medicine is changing.
The event began with a talk by Prof Ian Kunkler, Consultant Clinical Oncologist & Professor in Clinical Oncology at the Edinburgh Cancer research Centre. Prof Kunkler began by evidencing his statement that radiotherapy delivers a 50% reduction in breast cancer reappearance, compared with surgery alone. He stressed the importance of careful targeting of tumours with radiotherapy – not an easy task, especially if the patient is unavoidably moving (eg breathing) – Cyberknife enables much more precise targeting of tumours as it compensates for such movement. Apparently studies have shown that 55% of cancer patients will require radiotherapy at some point in their illness.
This was followed by Prof Joachim Gross, Chair of Systems Neuroscience, Acting Director of the Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging & Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator, University of Glasgow, talking about magnetoencephalopathy (MEG), which enables excellent spatial & temporal resolution of the brain. However it currently uses superconducting magnets that in turn require liquid helium, so is very expensive to run. He then showed an atomic magnetometer which apparently is developing fast and will be a much cheaper alternative to MEG – he expects people will be able to wear sensors embedded in a cap soon. He then went on to show truly excellent graphics on decoding brain signals with incredible precision; he explained that the 2025 challenge is understanding how the different brain areas interact. Finally he described neurostimulation, using an alternating magnetic field with the same frequency as brain waves to change behaviour; whence the emergence of neuromodulation as a new therapy. Both exciting, and just a little scary.
Dr David Clifton, Lecturer, Dept of Engineering Science & Computational Informatics Group, University of Oxford, followed with a talk on real-time patient monitoring. He began by explaining the challenges that clinicians face with this wall of patient data coming towards them: only “big data in healthcare” enables all the data generated by patients to be analysed to identify the early warning signals that are so important to minimise death and maximise recovery. (more…)
What follows is a brief summary of the presentations given at the Royal Society of Medicine’s third “Appday”, held on 9th April 2015. All three events have been sell-outs.
Anne Hayes, Head of Market Development at BSI, opened the event with an excellent presentation on the then shortly-to-be-finalised PAS 277 on mHealth apps (now available, free, here). She particularly welcomed the opportunity to present to clinicians, as too often her audience was primarily technologists. The presentation was especially impressive because Anne had only agreed to do the presentation the previous Friday, following realisation by both MHRA & NICE that proximity to the election meant neither could present. Anne explained that PAS 277, as a Publicly Available Specification, is not mandatory – it is essentially a checklist for developers and purchasers of medical apps to consider.
Julie Bretland, CEO of OurMobileHealth, then presented on the preliminary conclusions of the NIB Workstream 1.2 on how best to approve medical apps. (more…)
The next RSM event, entitled “Mainstreaming medical apps; reducing NHS costs; improving patient outcomes” is on 9th April, where there are still a few spaces left. This one-day conference will build on the last two years’ sell-out one-day conferences on medical apps at the RSM.
This year as medical apps are coming of age, the focus is on the critical aspects of mainstreaming them, in particular the various UK and EU regulatory issues that need managing in order to enable apps to be recommended or prescribed with confidence by clinicians. This will also include examples of ground- breaking medical apps as well as the use of electronic games to promote health and wellbeing.
Speakers on the regulatory side include, from the UK Professor Gillian Leng, Deputy Chief Executive of NICE, and Jo Hagan-Brown & Dr Neil McGuire from the MHRA, and from the European Commission Pēteris Zilgalvis, Head of Unit for Health and Well-being. Julian Hitchcock from lawyers Lawford Davies Denoon will give another of his excellent talks summarising the regulatory position from a user’s point of view, Dr Richard Brady will update us on bad apps and Julie Bretland will describe progress on the National Information Board’s work on how best to evaluate medical apps.
From the patient perspective, Alex Wyke will be talking about developing guidelines for good practice in health apps and Dr Tom Lewis from Warwick (in place of Prof Jeremy Wyatt now sadly unable to attend) will be talking about how best to evidence benefits from apps.
Describing some novel apps will be Professor Ray Meddis, on how to make an iPhone a hearing aid, Professor Susan Michie from UCL on gamification of smoking cessation, Ileana Welte from big White Wall on why mental health is such fertile ground for apps, and Ian Hay describing the challenges of using Android apps to deliver artificial pancreas-like functionality for the GSMA Brussels to Barcelona bike ride.
Should be a great day, and at the RSM’s rates, a tiny fraction of the cost of a commercially-run event!
Supplier offer
For £50/table, the RSM is also offering SMEs the opportunity to demonstrate their medical apps to the professional audience during refreshment breaks and at lunch (for more information on this offer contact Charlotte on 0207 290 3942). There are just four tables left now.
Thought there are few details just now, the UCL Festival for Digital Health is looking for people to get involved.
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