Many minds make great medtech Why the human element is essential

Many minds make great medtech When you think about medtech, what image comes to mind? Robotic surgery, bionic limbs, miniature implants helping us move, think or even feel?

Creating prosthetics that work with their owners

There are challenges to working in a patient-led and creative way, especially when walking the confined paths

Perhaps these are some of the more extreme associations, but they do reflect an underlying misperception about the sector – that medtech devices and diagnostics aim to supersede the human side of medicine, either by replacing parts of us or elements of the healthcare system.

In reality, this view is far from the truth, especially with the new generation of medtech where devices and diagnostics meet AI, machine learning and software to enable us to manage our own health, while being more connected to healthcare systems. With these innovations, personalisation is the ultimate goal, and this can only be achieved by including patients and the public throughout the journey.

Bringing back smiles for people with Parkinson’s disease

Embedding patient and public involvement and engagement from the outset of an innovation requires time, resources and a large helping of curiosity, but it does bring clear benefits. The initial idea behind Charco Neurotech’s CUE1 device came from direct conversations with Parkinson’s patients when CEO and Co-founder Lucy Jung was completing her Master’s in Innovation Design Engineering at Imperial. She was interested in the use of technology to improve the quality of life for those with long-term health conditions and, when she spoke to people with Parkinson’s, she noticed that many reported an improvement in symptoms from the use of massage chairs. Encouraged by this to research the area, she discovered the work of Professor Jean-Martin Charcot, from whom the company takes its name. Charco Neurotech is now developing wearable devices that help the movement of Parkinson’s patients through the production of vibration that stimulates the tactile sensory system.

Last year the company raised $10 million in seed funding which was the largest European round in 2021 for a health technology device. “I think Charco is really special in its level of patient-centricity,” says Jung. “We encourage all our team to spend as much time as they need working with patients because we believe it’s the most important insight for our company. We now have a community of patients, families and carers behind us who constantly let us know what they need, what helps them and the problems they face. It’s invaluable.”

Alongside direct stimulation, the CUE1 device uses pulsed vibrations to provide cueing which helps people initiate or maintain movement. The device is paired with an app that can remind patients to take medication and enables the team to track symptoms. The aim is for the data to ultimately allow the company to identify different symptoms profiles and match these to specific patterns of stimulation, enabling more personalised approaches. “It’s a challenge,” says Jung, “but we really want to provide this tailored care for people with Parkinson’s, so we are modifying our business structure to a model that provides constant provision for individuals and can adapt to the ever-changing nature of their condition.”

“Although a one per cent improvement in symptoms may sound small, when people with Parkinson’s report that for them it feels like a miracle, then we need to realise that sometimes a small numerical shift can translate to much more in real lives.”

Lucy Jung, CEO and Co-founder, Charco Neurotech

of regulation, clinical trials and health economics that are essential to validating medtech. Companies have to be flexible enough to react to patient and user insight while also staying on track with their plans to get their product to market.

In legal terms, the wearable robotics startup Unhindr is a medtech device company, but they have consciously avoided the classic blue-green formal look adopted by many medtech brands and websites. Their logo depicts a person lifting their arms in joy and freedom, reflecting the company’s vision to enable amputees to live a life that is unhindered by their prosthetics. Unhindr has developed Roliner, an AI-adjusted, sock-like adaptive silicone wearable that goes inside the lower limb prosthetic. By applying a machine learning approach to the data collected by sensors within the liner, it can adapt to the body and understand the changing needs of its wearer throughout the day. Roliner aims to reduce the clinical dependency of amputees while improving their quality of life and comfort.

“We bring together a lot of different fields of expertise,” says CEO Ugur Tanriverdi who co-founded the company while completing his PhD in Bioengineering at Imperial. “Microfluidics, software, product design, engineering, clinical data, human factors … the list goes on. In essence, what we are trying to do is improve comfort and this is a highly subjective metric in terms of a person’s psychology, their day-to-day activities and how they interact with their device. This lived experience is essential to consider; for many amputees, their prosthetic is almost like a companion. They go everywhere with it, they decorate it, and I have even seen an amputee using his prosthetic leg socket as a beer holder in a car. So, we have all this human complexity that we have to fit within the legal and regulatory requirements of a medical device.”

“If we had taken a purely engineering approach, then we may have produced a marvel that looks fantastic but probably not one that people would interact with.”

Ugur Tanriverdi, CEO and Co-founder, Unhindr

An agile and adaptive accelerator

Both Unhindr and Charco Neurotech have been part of the MedTech SuperConnector (MTSC) – an accelerator working with eight institutes to enable early-career researchers (ECRs) to develop their medtech innovations. By working with entrepreneurs at an early stage, a large part of MTSC’s work is enabling them to maintain their passion and focus while meeting the regulatory challenges of innovating in the medtech sector.

One of the MTSC’s huge advantages is its fluidity: since the accelerator is not required to develop a standard programme of activities, it has the room to breathe and take stock so it can adjust its support to the needs of its cohorts. “Our funding was inherently flexible in nature,” says Hiten Thakrar, Head of MTSC. “And that has enabled us to try new approaches, different infrastructures of support and learning content, and to bring in external players such as industry partners, healthcare systems, mentors and advisers so we could experiment and really listen to our cohorts and their needs.”

MTSC has supported 85 ECRs from eight institutes and, so far, 14 spinouts have been formed and 17 patents filed. Some of these success stories are from institutes that had never commercialised a technology before, and the innovations are as diverse as the backgrounds of their creators. What they all share is putting people at the centre of their development. “Whether we are consumers or investors, patients or the public,” says Thakrar, “I think we all engage more with the story or narrative of what this means for people rather than the technology itself. Fortunately, we have a generation of medtech entrepreneurs who are doing just that.”

Find out more about the MedTech SuperConnector here:

in numbers 6

cohorts with 85 ECRs supported from 8 higher education institutes

(49% /51% male to female gender split)

46+

people employed in Ventures

14

spinouts formed

17

patents filed

8technologies progressed towards clinical and user trials £17M+

raised in venture capital and grants

25+ 1st

pilot programmes and partnerships signed

commercialisation of a technology venture for the Royal College of Music

Building on the learnings and successes of a threeyear multi-institutional approach to experimenting with the acceleration of medical technologies, MTSC has established a partnership with Imperial College Business School to lead in the co-creation of digital learning content, curriculum design and academic direction, helping to scale the MTSC impact. The next step for the MTSC is to scale this established model of medtech acceleration nationally, with the inclusion of an innovation seed fund and world-leading digital entrepreneurship learning content.