Inspiritus Health

take an hour for lunch to have lunch with my family. I would generally switch off from work at

5:30, or earlier if I finished my tasks but ensured I stayed reachable until 5:30.

Lasting Impressions

I very much enjoyed the internship, and it gave me a good appreciation of a growing sector and

one which relates to my subject and areas of interest. Studying economics and management I

am very interested in the policy aspects of the sustainability sector, and this internship placed me at the forefront of how this affects organisations and what they are enabled to/ incentivised

to do- whether this was how innovators were helped and propelled forward, or whether it was

regulations pushing organisations to reach more ambitious sustainability goals and therefore

join the action groups which Innovation gateway had set up. The internship has incentivised me

to pursue a career in this sector due to its importance in the world and the fact that it is greatly

growing.

Alec Berry, Balliol College, MEng Engineering Science, Third Year Undergraduate

(of a four-year course), a mixture of in-person and remote working

Work Projects

My internship project was with Inspiritus Health, a

medical engineering start-up that aims to reduce the

amount of time that patients in intensive care wards

spend on mechanical ventilation. Within a week of being

placed on mechanical ventilation, patients can lose over a

third of their respiratory muscle mass. This leads to 40% of their time on ventilation being used to

gradually rebuild the muscle tissue by weaning off the ventilator. At Inspiritus Health, we are designing a non-invasive medical device that will prevent muscle atrophy while on a ventilator, thereby significantly

reducing the time spent on a ventilator. My tasks revolved around designing a system that can

determine the strength and fatigue of the respiratory muscles. This will provide live data to clinicians

that they can use to make a more educated decision for when to remove a patient from ventilation.

First, I identified possible methods of determining the strength of the respiratory muscles, and found

research papers that supported my hypothesized method, and confirmed its viability. After this I

successfully created a prototype to record the relevant biomedical signals and had moved on to

processing the signal to extract the useful data that clinicians could use. Mihir Sheth, CEO of Inspiritus

Health, helped and guided me throughout the process. I was provided with any prototyping equipment

that I required for my portion of the project, and Mihir gave me great direction to ensure I tackled

problems sequentially, so we were able to clearly track the progress of the prototype.

Daily Life

My internship began with a meeting in the Thom building where the team met and got to know each

other. There, were introduced to the project, and discussed what we wanted to achieve from the

internship. The internship was a hybrid of online and in-person working. We had a weekly meeting on Wednesdays in the Royal Academy of Engineering in London, where we discussed problems we were

facing and worked together to solve them. The rest of the time was spent working from home, with

morning and afternoon calls where we could give update on our progress and help each other.

I enjoyed this experience, as it gave me the flexibility I

have during my University studies while maintaining

good contact with the team through the frequent

online meetings, and we developed good relationships

through the weekly meetings. While working

remotely, I would work through the morning from

9:00, when we had our morning meeting, until 12:30,

when I stopped for lunch. I then worked more before our ‘power hour’ meeting from 14:30 until 15:30. After this, I continued to work until the end of the day at 17:30. To relax afterwards I would either go

cycling or row.

Lasting Impressions

I really enjoyed my experience at Inspiritus Health, and would highly recommend working there. I gained

a great insight into how a start-up works, and the difficulties that they face. In particular, I learnt about

the roadmap of taking an idea through prototyping to generate investment, and to iteratively improve