Projects that monitor the health of older people awarded funding to tackle the key impacts of ageing

Projects including special glasses that link to a smartphone to measure visual field loss and a smart sock with embedded sensors that records leg muscle and movement activity are among 12 that will share new funding.

The 12 projects are winners of a competition designed to support social enterprises in developing products and services that tackle some of the key impacts of ageing.

Funded by UK Research and Innovation’s (UKRI’s) Healthy Ageing Challenge, the Scaling Social Ventures competition provides up to £500,000 in funding for individual successful projects.

All projects are run by social entrepreneurs and tackle one or more of the common concerns of ageing, including impaired hearing, eyesight, mobility, mental wellbeing; sustaining physical activity for over-50s, and innovative models of care for independent living.

Funded by UKRI’s Healthy Ageing Challenge, winners are also part of the US National Academy of Medicine Healthy Longevity Global Competition. UK winners are also eligible for the accelerator phase of this global competition, including a $5 million (£4,015,400) grand prize.

George MacGinnis, Healthy Ageing Challenge Director at UKRI, said: “Social enterprises play an important part in reaching into communities and helping those most in need fulfil the potential of healthier longer lives. Research has highlighted the difficulties that successful social enterprises face in raising funds to grow. That’s why the Healthy Ageing Challenge will provide £4.4 million funding through the Small Business Research Initiative (SBRI).

“The funding is designed to help extend the benefits of ageing healthily to areas where people have the most to gain from improvements in healthy life expectancy.

“The projects address a broad range of issues and have a key role to play in reducing the pressures on the NHS and social care through movements such as social prescribing.”

The Catalyst Awards have provided 54 grants over three years for academics based at UK research organisations. The award winners explore innovative ideas with the potential to transform the physical, mental, or social wellbeing of people across the world as they age.

In addition to a grant of up to £62,500 per project, award holders benefit from a nine-month part-time programme of support delivered by. This helps to accelerate their ideas and enables the researchers to maximise the reach and impact of their work.

All ideas are expected to fit with the priority areas of the UKRI Healthy Ageing Challenge. These include supporting social connections, living well with cognitive impairment, managing the common complaints of ageing, sustaining physical activity, maintaining health at work, design for age friendly homes and creating healthy active places.

The Healthy Ageing Challenge is funded by UKRI and delivered by Innovate UK and the Economic and Social Research Council.

12 projects have been funded under the Scaling Social Ventures competition, including Appt Health, which will apply research intelligence to encourage more older adults, particularly those living in areas of deprivation, to take up and attend preventative healthcare appointments.

Listed below are the projects with an assistive technology focus.

Aesop Arts and Society will roll out its Dance to Health programme, which is designed to prevent falls and their repercussions in older people by ensuring they are fitter and more agile.

Local Treasures will expand its current programme that provides flexible work opportunities to the over-50s in their local community using an automated matching platform which connects them to customers, so they stay engaged and active.

HoPES will reach more people waiting for hip and knee surgery, encouraging them to stay socially connected and as fit as possible while they wait through a tried and tested exercise programme and app.

Disabled Living in north-west England will develop a video conferencing occupational therapy assessment tool that integrates seamlessly with a GPs current system. This will effectively assess what equipment, like a handrail, might provide better quality of life for their patients and reduce the risk of falls.

Good Boost Wellbeing Limited is employing artificial intelligence to encourage more older adults with musculoskeletal conditions to join and stick with exercise and rehabilitation programmes run in local leisure centres.

Active Care Homes through the Arts provides residents in care homes inspiring and engaging digital arts content along with support for the staff to motivate and encourage residents to move more.

In addition, four further UK-led projects, which have previously secured funding in a global competition to reward the best ideas in healthy ageing innovation, have just been awarded additional funding by UKRI to scale up their ideas.

Projects include MyoSock, a smart sock with embedded sensors that records leg muscle and movement activity, with specialised software that calculates muscle health. This allows the user to increase exercise or change what they eat to improve muscle health. MyoSock will help with drug development to help increase muscle mass and function in people with muscle wasting, a common side effect of ageing.

Eyecatcher are special glasses that link to a smartphone that measures visual field loss. Designed to be easy to use by eye patients at home, results can also be sent to a user’s medical records, including those used by NHS England and NHS Scotland, for review by a clinician.

Bia is an app that helps to keep women in midlife healthy, happy, and productive in the workplace. It is co-designed by women, for women. It takes evidence-based components of exercise that are essential for the health of women in midlife and provides a clear, motivating, structured programme to follow that is underpinned by exercise and behavioural science.

These four UK innovations, selected from 33 previous winners of the Healthy Ageing Catalyst Awards will get an extra £125,000 to further develop their inventions and bring them to market, with the NHS, local authorities, companies and individuals.

The awards harness the most innovative and cutting-edge ideas of researchers to create practical, scalable products and services that deliver impact and support older people.

Last year, AI start-up Tendertec won funding for an interesting £1.8 million project to encourage sustainable physical activity in older people through the use of helpful and engaging healthcare technologies.