Emergence: Tackling Frailty – Facilitating the Emergence of Healthcare Robots from Labs into Service

Professor Praminda Caleb-Solly at the University of Nottingham is leading a team of four other UK universities; Sheffield, Heriot-Watt, Sheffield Hallam, and Hertfordshire, to establish a new network: EMERGENCE. The network aims to create a robotics for healthcare community, which connects researchers, health and social care professionals, service users, regulators and policy makers, to bring about the wider use of healthcare robots to support people living with frailty in the community.  The network is funded by the The Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC).

The EMERGENCE network will explore how robots can be used to support people to better self-manage the conditions that result from frailty and, by providing information and data to healthcare practitioners, enabling more timely interventions. The EMERGENCE consortium is a world class multi-disciplinary team who bring not only their expertise in healthcare technology research, but also innovative living lab testbeds from across the country (CoBot Maker Space Living Lab at University of Nottingham, the National Robotarium in Edinburgh together with the Health Innovation South East Scotland’s Midlothian test bed, the Advanced Wellbeing Research Centre and CATCH HomeLab in Sheffield, and the Robot House at the University of Hertfordshire).   

The network will nurture and support a community of researchers in healthcare and robotics through pilot feasibility studies, sponsored and facilitated by the network to develop new approaches beyond the state-of-the-art. This co-designed research will lead to novel technologies capable of transforming how frailty is managed in the community. These pilots will underpin the development of larger programme grants and trials, providing the researchers involved with the basis to extend their research.

To follow the progress of the network and receive information about network activities, contact us for more information on becoming a network member.