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Innovators come up with new ways to help fight Covid-19

Dementia institute repurposes technology for coronavirus testing while UCL makes breathing aid design freely available

Researchers are continuing to come up with new ways to help ease the burden on the overstretched health service during the coronavirus crisis.

The UK Dementia Institute (UKDRI), the UK’s largest dementia research initiative, announced on 7 April that it had repurposed robotic technology usually used to test for infections in vulnerable people, including those living with dementia.

According to the institute, the technology could “substantially increase the UK’s capacity to test people for coronavirus”, with the ability to process almost 1,000 coronavirus samples in a 12-hour period.

Paul Freemont, group leader at the UKDRI’s Care Research and Technology Centre at Imperial College London and the University of Surrey, said: “Getting a platform like this up and running isn’t straightforward—there are a lot of things to account for that could be the difference between success and failure, like the reliability of supply chains for sample kits, reagents and other essential equipment.

“We have been diversifying and stress-testing a range of supply lines to make sure our platform can be used to its fullest capacity.”

The initiative was announced after the government pledged to increase coronavirus tests to 100,000 per day by the end of April.

Meanwhile, University College London has made the designs of a breathing aid developed in collaboration with Formula One freely available to help Covid-19 patients to breathe more easily.

The government has already ordered up to 10,000 of the devices, which are being produced at a rate of 1,000 a day at the HPP technology centre in Northamptonshire.

Rebecca Shipley, director of the UCL Institute of Healthcare Engineering, said: “We hope that, by making the blueprints publicly available, they can be used to improve the resilience of healthcare systems preparing for the Covid-19 pandemic globally.”

At the University of Oxford, meanwhile, data visualisation spinout Zegami announced that it had developed a new machine-learning model using X-rays of Covid-19 infected lungs, artificial intelligence and data visualisation tools that could help medical professionals identify cases more effectively.

Zegami has now written an open letter to the Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust and the NHS as a whole, asking for Covid-19 X-rays and details on treatments used for patients and the outcomes.

In addition to helping identify cases of coronavirus more quickly, Roger Noble, CEO and founder of Zegami, hopes that they “can help identify potential outcomes for patients by comparing their cases with former patients who had similar conditions and learning what happened to them”.