A Tayside health initiative has been launched to search for medical technologies that could bring healthcare closer to communities and reduce health inequalities.

Tay Health Tech has announced a new fund of around £1 million for health innovations that will directly benefit the Tayside region, and is now inviting funding applications focused on technologies or devices that could help patients be treated in their homes or local communities, rather than in centralised hospitals.

The new 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, focussing on conditions such as lung cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and diabetes.

Patient feedback from the workshops helped the Tay Health Tech team identify four ‘Grand Challenges’ that underpin the funding call, including Hospital at Home, Rehabilitation, Testing, and Prevention and Prognostics.

Researchers in the Tay Health Tech consortium are being invited to apply for funding to further develop medical devices targeting these areas, such as technology to enable at-home testing, support rehabilitation exercises, or assist with remote monitoring. 

Two levels of funding are available, with the first level being for smaller and shorter projects to support proof of market or proof of concept stages. The second level of funding is for larger or longer projects of up to two years that will take a project to a higher technology readiness level through further development. 

“By helping to develop and commercialise new healthcare technologies, we want to move healthcare closer to communities, making it more accessible to everyone,” said Professor Marc Desmulliez, a medical devices engineer at Heriot-Watt’s School of Engineering and Physical Sciences.

“Ideally, we are looking for existing outputs from engineering and physical sciences research that can be applied to community healthcare – rather than ideas for new technologies. 

“We think researchers will have current projects, but also maybe research they’ve worked on previously – that could open exciting new possibilities in community-based patient care.”

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Tay Health Tech is led by the University of Dundee and Edinburgh’s Heriot-Watt University in collaboration with NHS Tayside and Dundee City Council, with these partners and another three universities from the Tay Health Tech consortium – University of St Andrews, University of Glasgow and Edinburgh Napier University – included in the funding call.

Other partners in the initiative include Angus Council, Dundee and Angus College, InnoScot Health, BioDundee, medical research specialist SHARE, Scottish Enterprise, and UKRI.

In February, two of Tay Health Tech’s partners, Heriot-Watt and Edinburgh Napier Universities, signed a Memorandum of Understanding for a joint programme allowing Heriot-Watt engineering students to visit Napier’s specialised clinical simulation facilities, in order to gain first-hand understanding of current healthcare scenarios and challenges.