The Welsh Health Hack goes online for COVID-19 challenge

Over the past few years, the Bevan Commission has collaborated with others to create, design, develop and run the Welsh Health Hack. It brings technology companies together with NHS staff and academics over two days, in order to create innovative solutions to clinical or operational challenges.

Collaborators have included MediWales, the Life Sciences Hub Wales, Welsh Government, M-Sparc, Wales Deanery, AgorIP, Accelerate and NWIS. Every NHS health board and trust has supported the event by sponsoring and supporting their staff to attend.

Supported by the Bevan Commission’s Health Technology Programmes, collaborations formed between technology companies and the NHS have developed a number of successful new technologies, some of which are currently in use in the NHS, while others are being tested.

The idea of a COVID-19 focused Welsh Health Hack was initially mooted. After all, how do you deliver a two day networking event when people aren’t allowed to leave the house? The obvious solution was to do it online. Less obvious, however, was how it would work in practice. There was a lot to consider – including getting people to attend, encouraging participants to collaborate on solutions, forming a panel to judge the solutions, and organising follow-up with prizes and support.

Following online publicity, 17 people submitted challenges and 100 people turned up online to take part in the event.

A team led by Dr Simon Burnell, consultant anaesthetist at Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board, ultimately won first place and an £8,000 grant at the Welsh Health Hack. The team included design engineer Wyn Griffith from Wyn Griffith Designs, product designer Thomas Turner from Ember Technology Design, and Dr Arif Reza Anwary, an innovation technologist at Swansea University Medical School’s Healthcare Technology Centre (HTC).

The team came up with MaskComms, a microphone designed to be small enough to fit inside a face mask and transmit voice through wireless to a wearable loudspeaker. This would work as a

“Communication is essential during procedures where the anaesthetic and surgical teams work closely, but health and safety is also paramount, so their FFP3 masks cannot be removed to talk to each other. The downside to wearing facial masks is that our voices become muffled and indistinct, and we cannot read facial cues. I proposed a solution which allows a device to be placed in any mask, which can transmit to every colleague, or to one communal speaker without compromising the PPE.” Dr Simon Burnell, Consultant Anaesthetist Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board

communication aid for frontline health staff who must wear face masks during the pandemic.

MaskComms, which will now go into production in North Wales, offers an adaptable platform so a group of healthcare professionals wearing masks can communicate easily in the hospital environment, such as in an operating theatre during a surgical procedure.