The ECS Centre for Health Technologies (CHT) was established in 2018 to facilitate coordination between ECS academics and practitioners in the health domain, such as the fields of e-health, healthcare technologies, wellbeing and rehabilitation. ECS has significant expertise spanning many areas in the health domain.
Impact is delivered by the CHT through:
At the start of the pandemic, Professor Hywel Morgan and his group designed, prototyped and tested a new protective respirator, “PeRSo”. which now HSE approval. The PeRSo project united experts in ECS, engineering and medicine with industry partners. The respirator can be worn throughout a worker’s shift, is reusable and manufactured in the UK. The concept was published open-source and made available to other manufacturers and organisations around the world, facilitating an international response.
As the pandemic progressed, Professor Michael Boniface and his team worked closely with NHS Trusts across the region to track and curate ‘suspected COVID’ and ‘positive COVID’ from first presentation to pre and post hospital admission. This included trajectory events, physiological observations and drug interventions, alongside baseline demographics and risk factors. This data characterised the full disease trajectory and treatment, through to medical stabilisation at discharge.
Moving forward, the team is working with clinicians, public health experts, and the Wessex Applied Research Collaboration (ARC) and Hampshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust on Long Covid.