A project at the University of Glasgow using quantum-powered sensors for HealthTech monitoring has received £5.5 million in funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

It is one of the six university projects invested in by the EPSRC’s Transformative Healthcare Technologies for 2050 fund, focusing on developing new technologies to transform care and treatment in the NHS over the next three decades.

The Glasgow University project brings together engineers, psychologists and computer scientists with primary and secondary care clinicians to explore how the homes of the future could have HealthTech sensors integrated into them.

It aims to find new ways of using quantum technologies to monitor blood flow, heart rate, movement and potentially brain activity. This could then be used to create bespoke information about an individual's’ health, to help those recovering from illness to be monitored remotely by healthcare professionals.

Jon Cooper, the project’s principal investigator and the university’s Wolfson chair of bioengineering, said: “We believe that the home environment has huge potential as a place where transformational healthcare changes can occur in the future - we hope to find new ways to make the home an extension of our physical bodies, providing the kind of detailed feedback on our wellness and monitoring of health markers that we cannot do ourselves.

“The analysis of the data streams from the sensors will be validated using clinically-approved models, providing users with 24/7 medical expertise to help them keep fit and healthy," he continued, adding: “The data collected by the sensors might also help to predict the early stages of non-communicable diseases like heart attacks and strokes and provide invaluable new ways to track the transmission of infectious diseases.”

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