A total of £11.1 million in funding has been committed to the launch of a wearables and remote monitoring innovation cluster in Greater Manchester; a partnership between Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust, The University of Manchester, Manchester Metropolitan University, and the NIHR Manchester Health Determinants Research Collaboration.
£5,5 million of the funding comes from the Local Innovation Partnerships Fund delivered through UK Research and Innovation, and a further £5.6 million is from commercial partners. The ambition is to help reduce barriers to innovation in wearable and remote health monitoring technologies by developing a simpler process to bring technologies to the market.
Manchester University NHS chief executive Mark Cubbon, said: “This new initiative is designed to remove barriers and encourage investment, bringing the latest innovations and lasting impact. Wearable tech can give people greater choice and control over their health and care, and it’s exciting that Greater Manchester is at the centre of this new phase of digital innovation.”
Katherine Boylan, deputy managing director for research and innovation and project lead, spoke of her “excitement” about the cluster, adding: “This will allow us to take these new concepts and test them with our patients to see how this technology can make a difference, and how it can be improved. By removing barriers and attracting investment, this innovation can be accelerated so that new ideas are robustly evaluated and improved upon, putting Greater Manchester at the forefront of a new age of wearable technology in healthcare.”
Focus on wearable tech
Late last year, we were joined by a panel of experts to discuss digital apps and wearables in health and care, exploring how these technologies can be integrated into the health system now and in the future. Our panellists included Gail Lowe, high intensity users lead & county integrated discharge hub lead across Staffordshire & Stoke-on-Trent and Soo Hun, innovation & digital eco-system lead at Digital Health & Care NI. Our panel began by explaining some of the recent projects they’ve been working on in terms of utilising digital apps and wearables within their organisations.
East Suffolk and North Essex NHS Foundation Trust’s latest clinical strategy to 2031 has incorporated the shift from analogue to digital outlined in the 10-Year Plan, setting out ambitions to modernise planned care, digitally enable outpatient services, and introduce tech such as digital pathology and AI decision support. Following on from the five “big bets” in the 10-Year Plan, ESNEFT commits to strengthening BI and analytics capabilities, including population health management; AI capabilities “both within and outside” its EPR; to pursuing genomics with strategic partnerships; to establish wearables as “a standard component of care”; and to use its Robotic Centre of Excellence to expand access to robotic surgery for patients.
Microsoft has launched Copilot Health, said to provide users the ability to bring together data from across their health records, wearables, and lab results, applying intelligence to turn insights into “a coherent story”. Copilot Health is positioned to support people understand the information they have, part of a “secure space within Copilot where medical intelligence makes sense of your information and delivers personalised health insights that you can act on”. With Copilot Health, users will be able to record activity levels, sleep patterns, vital signs, visit summaries, medication lists, and test results from more than 50 wearable devices and health records from over 50,000 US hospitals and health providers. AI is then used to identify patterns in health data, reportedly surfacing proactive and actionable insights.
