People in Scotland could soon benefit from AI-powered technology for dementia patients or an app to support those living with prostate cancer as the grantees for a pioneering fund are announced today.

Six digital innovative technologies have been awarded £30,000 each as part of a fund to help people in Scotland lead healthier lives and have more control over their health and care.

The Healthier Lives Data Fund, a partnership between Nesta and the Scottish Government, aims to support innovative digital technologies that make data available and useful to citizens so they can lead more independent lives.

The fund comes in response to the rising availability of data related to our health and wellbeing, as well as the Scottish Government’s ambition that everyone living in Scotland will have access to the digital information, tools and services they need to help maintain and improve their health and wellbeing.

In addition to financial support, Nesta will be working closely with the six grantees across the year to develop and test their innovations, hoping to unlock the potential of a new generation of data-driven, people-facing digital technologies for health in Scotland.

The six grantees are;

• Pharmatics, CareAI: This project will look to improve the lives of those living with COPD by using artificial intelligence to determine when people are likely to deteriorate with their illness, giving patients more control over their condition.
• Px Healthcare, Prostate Cancer app: After the success of their app for breast cancer patients, OWise, they are hoping to develop a similar application for those living with prostate cancer, which will use patient-reported data to improve clinical outcomes and the quality of patients’ lives.
• University of Salford, Fan Fit: By targeting football supporters through their app, Fan Fit, they hope to improve people’s physical activity and therefore overall health and wellbeing.
• Cognihealth, Cognicare: Their aim is to use personalised AI-powered digital technology to provide solutions to dementia care, enabling early intervention and prevention and improving the quality of care for individuals and their families.
• NquiringMinds, Careteam PA: This project will give the cared for person control of their care data and empowers them to selectively and securely share their health information with formal and informal carers.
• University of Edinburgh: They hope to develop an interactive mobile app to support parents and carers of children going through the autism diagnosis pathway.

Sinead Mac Manus, Senior Programme Manager at Nesta, said:

“We are really excited to announce the six grantees on the Healthier Lives Data Fund. Each day rich health and care data is collected about us. However, much of the value of this data is not accessible to citizens themselves.

“This new fund will put health and care data in the hands of people through a range of digital technologies enabling them to manage their long term conditions more effectively, navigate the complex autism diagnosis pathway better, or share their care data with the right people at the right time.

“We are pleased to be working in the partnership with the Scottish Government on this fund which has the potential to inspire a new generation of People Powered digital health.”

The Scottish Government’s Health Secretary Jeane Freeman said:

“The Scottish Government’s Digital Health and Care Strategy makes clear that we want to make greater use of digital technology in healthcare. Our collaboration with NESTA is allowing us to explore how digital can help people gain greater control over their wellbeing, and to better engage with services. These six projects all have the potential to use data to improve people’s health, allowing them to harness the benefits of digital technology.”

The programme will begin on the 1st of April and run to December 2019. You can read more about the fund here.

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For more information, please contact Wallis Grant in the press office at [email protected] or on 020 7438 2543 / 07557 162 651

Notes to editors:

QUOTES FROM GRANTEES

Dr Alex Fenton, Lecturer in Digital Business at University of Salford said:

“We’re really excited for Fan Fit to have been selected and the opportunity to work with Nesta and the Scottish Government. Our mission is to make a real difference to the lives of Scottish football supporters using technology in an engaging and exciting way and we can’t wait to get started.”

Pooja Jain founder at CogniHealth said:

“At CogniHealth we are very excited to receive the Healthier Lives Data Fund! To us it's much more than just financial support. Being able to access the Nesta network is incredible, providing us with the opportunity to work with a larger number of experts in the healthcare sector and families affected by dementia. This will give us unique insights into how we can make CogniCare better. This fund also enables us to use external healthcare datasets for our AI-powered platform to empower carers further.”

Hannah Dalton, Project Manager at NquiringMinds said:

“With the support of the Healthier Lives Data Fund, CareTeam will be trialled in a new area of Personal Assistants. It will be enhanced and extended to realise the potential of combining unpaid and paid for care to look after someone with our increasingly busy lives and huge amounts of information and data. This new partnership creates the potential to extend and improve CareTeam and we are delighted to receive this support.”

Anne Bruinvels, Founder at Px Healthcare said:

“We are delighted to have been awarded a grant by Nesta’s Healthier Lives Data Fund to develop our mobile patient support platform OWise for people affected by prostate cancer.

The natural fit between the Fund and our expertise in applying real-time Patient Reported Outcome data to improve patient experience and support clinicians with immediate insights to deliver better clinical outcomes, is very helpful to improve Scotland’s prostate cancer patients’ lives in the very near term.”

About Nesta

Nesta is a global innovation foundation. We back new ideas to tackle the big challenges of our time, making use of our knowledge, networks, funding and skills. We work in partnership with others, including governments, businesses and charities. We are a UK charity that works all over the world, supported by a financial endowment. To find out more visit www.nesta.org.uk

Nesta is a registered charity in England and Wales 1144091 and Scotland SC042833.