Med-Tech Innovation Awards 2020: The winners
Med-Tech Innovation News is delighted to announce the winners of this year’s 2020 awards.
Following on from the nominations announced in the previous issue, our expert panel of judges have been able pick our winners in a competitive field across our five categories. Here are the 2020 winners.
3D Printing winner – ExpHand Prosthetics
ExpHand develops 3D printed prosthetics for children aged three to ten, with an adjustable universal socket that can be fitted at home by parents.
Kate Walker, who founded the business during her final year at university, was inspired by meeting a little girl called Zoey who was born missing her left arm below the elbow and hadn’t been offered a prosthetic before. The company’s research found that existing prosthetics were expensive, custom fit and children tended to grow out of them quickly.
Walker said: “When we first started developing the ExpHand we were looking for a quick and easy way to prototype our design and test out new ideas and 3D printing was a great way to make that happen. We had access to a lab full of machines and so we could make design changes on a Monday and have a part ready for testing on a Tuesday which really helped us move forward with our development at a fast pace.
“The design freedom we were able to get by using 3D printing to manufacture our devices let us do some really interesting things such as having joints inbuilt into the prosthetic, which is something we wouldn’t be able to do with traditional manufacturing.”
Highly Commended: FabRX Ltd – its M3dimaker 3D printer prints solid oral medicine enabling personalised doses of medicine to meet specific health and therapeutic requirements in one pill.
Connected Health winner – Ainostics Ltd
Ainostics has developed an AI analysis engine which uses multi-modal patient data to perform diagnosis and prognosis for early dementia.
Explaining a bit more about the company and the solution it offers, the company told Med-Tech Innovation News: “Our purpose is to advance medicine and healthcare by turning data into clinically meaningful information. We develop integrated technologies that aim to improve and optimise every stage of the clinical care pathway for such conditions, as well as pharma trials for dementia therapeutics, and we continue to invest in infrastructure and innovation to support our ambitious vision.
“What we are developing at Ainostics is an array of platform technologies that aside from dementia, can be utilised for the diagnosis, prognosis and monitoring of a range of other neuropathologies.”
Highly Commended: The London Ambulance Service NHS Trust’s online Point of Care Testing (POCT) service enables en route pathological testing with results available online for the destination hospital.
Design Award winner – Charco Neurotech (formerly TheMoment)
TheMoment, recently rebranded as Charco Neurotech, sees its CUE1 device win the Design Award. The non-invasive wearable device uses pulsed cueing and focussed vibrotactile stimulation to ease the symptoms of Parkinson’s.
Lucy Jung, chief executive and founder of the company, explained the factors the company had to consider when developing the device.
“With our early prototypes, we worked together with our volunteers with Parkinson’s to adjust and tweak the stimulation and positioning of the device to produce the optimum effect. The usability of the device was also very important part of our journey: keeping in mind the challenges our users faced with their movement, we designed the device closely with them to make it desirable, easy to use, and effective.”
Highly Commended: Oxford VR has developed a virtual reality therapy platform with a computer-generated virtual coach for personalised treatment of mental health conditions – and has been adopted in four NHS Trusts.
Engineering winner – Biovation Orthopaedic Solutions Ltd
Biovation redesigned an instrument kit used to perform cartilage replacement implant surgery for big toe arthritis to eliminate pre-operative lead times, reduce manufacturing costs and lead times, and to allow more accurate surgery.
Matthew Marsden, technical manager, explained that the reusable kit was originally made from stainless steel and converting into plastic components was one of the big challenges but provided surgeons with greater visibility during procedures.
“The single use introducer component (used to compress the implant for implantation) is manufactured from transparent polycarbonate to provide surgeons clear visibility throughout the procedure. The new introducer component was also redesigned to feature a nose that fit inside the drilled cavity. This provided anchorage and stability during implantation. The drilled cavity was created by a metatarsal drill that had a stop collar for precise depth of cavity. The improved surgical accuracy of delivering the implant helps provide patients with a successful outcome.
“With plastics being more malleable, having lower yield strength and being more brittle than metals, the newly proposed plastic components had to be engineered to be as strong and reliable as their metal predecessors. We also had to consider how were going to sterilise the instrument set. The reusable predecessor was steam sterilised, which was not a viable means of sterilising the single use instrument set due to the new plastic components having a lower melting point than metals.”
Highly Commended: Marsden’s Patient Transfer Scale is a transfer board with an in-built weighing scale to enable immobile and time critical patients to be weighed instantly to allow for administering of drug doses and treatment.
Materials Innovation – Spyras
Spyras has developed a paper-based wearable device for continuous real-time breathing analysis in hospitals. The device is designed to automatically alert clinicians to early signs of patient deterioration.
Explaining the use of paper when it comes to respiratory monitoring, George Winfield, CEO & founder, said: “The paper you are reading this article from in adsorbing water from the environment without you noticing. By exploiting this hygroscopic nature of paper and the changes of moisture difference of exhaled and inhaled breath paired with a conductive electrode pairing on the papers surface to measure the conductivity changes of this cyclic change, gave an affordable, highly accurate and disposable sensor. The use of a paper sensor for respiratory monitoring was something not previously seen before.”
Highly Commended: Stratasys – Digital materials have been developed to allow the Stratasys Digital Anatomy Platform to replicate human anatomy which has the same biomechanical properties as native bone and tissue for realistic anatomical models.