South Yorkshire Digital Health Hub (SYDHH) has announced £500,000 of funding for seven innovative projects to help with disease diagnosis and address health inequalities across the region.
The University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University developed the £4 million South Yorkshire Digital Health Hub just over a year ago to “improve health and quality of life by creating innovative digital health tools that fuse data from daily life activities with NHS data”.
As part of this ambition, the hub has awarded funding to selected projects, designed to help improve treatment for a range of problems through the creation of novel clinical tools that utilise smartphones, wearable technology and data. The projects include:
- Using AI and data from wearables to help diagnose coronary artery disease.
- The development of a mobile app that tracks resistance training exercises and provides personalised feedback, to help patients prepare for joint replacement surgery and improve post-surgery outcomes.
- Tracking how patients with long-term neurological conditions walk in real-world situations, to help with diagnosis and monitoring.
- Giving women the opportunity to share their experiences with hormonal contraception to improve women’s health, particularly in under-represented communities.
- Simplifying medical imaging reports to improve patient understanding and reduce clinician workload.
- Using AI to better predict how long people with lung cancer will live and how well they will respond to treatment by combining data from medical images, tissue samples and patient records.
- Using wearable technology to detect early signs of bleeding in patients taking anti-clotting drugs, aiming for earlier intervention and prevention of serious health complications.
When discussing the development of one of these projects, Dr Rafic Ramses, lead investigator from the University of Sheffield, said: “Coronary Artery Disease is the UK’s biggest killer. Right now, diagnosing it often involves long waits, expensive tests like CT scans, and can be harder for some people to access than others. Our goal is to develop simple, quick tests that can be done in local communities. This would make CAD diagnosis faster, reduce the need for costly tests, and ensure everyone has equal access to care”.
Innovations in healthcare: the wider trend
In a recent HTN Now session, we spoke to a panel of digital leaders about their thoughts on innovation within healthcare. We discussed topics such as the employment of chat bots to deal with common patient queries, e-consultations and incorporating new technologies such as facial biometrics or biometric data. We also covered the challenges of innovation and how to foster the right culture surrounding this topic.
Norfolk and Waveney ICB awarded a two-year contract worth £250,000 to tech supplier Pungo, for a social prescribing digital platform. Utilising the Health Systems Support Framework, the ICB aimed to make improvements in care for the local community by using the digital platform to “support resilience and maturity of social prescribing offers”.
Imperial College London and Edinburgh University recently developed AI software for reading the brain scans of stroke patients, to understand when the stroke happened and whether it can be successfully treated. The AI algorithm was trained on a dataset of 800 brain scans with researchers teaching it to automatically find, read and analyse the relevant area from the brain scan to identify lesions.
Last month, we reported on the development of a new device that helps with identifying the most common causes of dizziness. Norfolk and Norwich University Hospitals together with the University of East Anglia have been working on the Continuous Ambulatory Vestibular Assessment (CAVA) device, which is being tested by patients across the country to help “speed up the diagnosis” of dizziness.
