Led by Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh and the University of Dundee, the fund will focus on technologies that help patients be treated in their homes or local communities.
Tay Health Tech has announced a fund of around £1 million to find medical technologies that will directly benefit the Tayside region.
The call specifically focuses on technologies or devices that could help patients be treated in their homes or local communities – for example, community clinics or social clubs – rather than in large centralised hospitals, which can sometimes be difficult for patients to reach.
“By helping to develop and commercialise new healthcare technologies, we want to move health and care closer to communities, making it more accessible to everyone and preventing unnecessary visits to the hospital,” says Marc Desmulliez, professor in electrical engineering at Heriot-Watt University.
The call for funding applications follows a series of workshops with NHS Tayside patients in Dundee, Perth, Arbroath and Cupar Angus. These covered disadvantaged, affluent, city and rural areas and focused on lung cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, diabetes and substance use.
Patient feedback from the workshops helped the Tay Health Tech team identify four areas that underpin the funding call. These are hospital at home, rehabilitation, testing, and prevention and prognostics.
Two levels of funding are available. The first level is for smaller, shorter projects that need funding, for example, to support proof of market or proof of concept stages. The second level of funding is for larger, longer projects of up to two years that will take a project to a higher technology readiness level through further development.
Tay Health Tech is led by Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh and the University of Dundee, in collaboration with NHS Tayside Innovation, which supports innovators in the healthcare system, and Dundee City Council. These partners and another three universities from the Tay Health Tech consortium – University of St Andrews, University of Glasgow and Edinburgh Napier University – are included in the funding call.
