The new Industrial Strategy: Building a Britain fit for the future identified "Ageing Society" as one of 4 Grand Challenges, each representing a focal point for investment to secure the prosperity of British industry by addressing real-world problems. In line with the preference of older people and their carers to age in place, and current policy guidance, the proposed research will involve collaboration with industry partners to help them address challenges in the implementation and uptake of new technologies to support sustainable arrangements for ageing in place capable of delivering wellbeing outcomes for older people. The Fellowship aligns with 4 "Pillars" of the Industrial Strategy: Pillar 1 - Investing in Science, Research and Innovation. The Fellow's innovative research focuses on innovations to address the Ageing Society Grand Challenge and aims to strengthen the role of UK expertise (in services, universities, innovation) in the global market for digital care products in ICTs, 'new generation' telecare products, and robotics. Pillar 3 - Upgrading Infrastructure. The digitisation of care has reconfigured approaches to care interactions, but current care UK infrastructure requires upgrading to take full advantage of innovations in this area. Pillar 5 - Improving Procurement. At present, procurement of care technologies relies heavily on local authorities and NHS Trusts. The research will explore how the rapidly emerging private care consumer market is influencing supply chains and its potential to drive innovation. Pillar 8 - Cultivating World-Leading Sectors. The UK's past role in developing new care technologies positions its innovators and universities to benefit from, and play a lead role in, the increasingly competitive global market for care technologies and services. The Fellow will examine challenges, benefits and possibilities for businesses and organisations designing and producing new technologies to support ageing in place. He will work closely with industry and non-academic partners to help them identify their needs and future potential, collaborating with six organisations which have already been recruited to the study and with others to be identified during the lifetime of the Fellowship. The research will focus on case examples of promising innovations. These will include companies developing various potentially transformative solutions, including assistive robotic systems capable of enhancing quality of life as people age; emotionally engaging and useful robot solutions for use in the homes of older people; and other technologies offering different kinds of modern care solutions attractive or useful to older people requiring care and those who provide their support (carers and care workers). The specific focus of each case will be selected in consultation with partners and through stakeholder interviews/desk research. Bespoke research techniques will be chosen, for their applicability to each case example and suitability to address research questions agreed with partners. A key issue will be to examine how suppliers of innovative products and services identify business development opportunities and access care markets. The research will include expert interviews, focused observations (in visits to the premises of partners) and analysis of documents. Methods will be qualitative (e.g. in-depth interviews, focus groups) and quantitative (e.g. surveys/analyses of company data), as applicable; the Fellow will identify/engage other stakeholders to take part if appropriate. The findings will show how innovators, manufacturers and suppliers view/approach challenges in the technology-enabled care market. The Fellow will work with them to discover and implement new approaches to marketing and developing sustainable products for successful ageing in place, making information available to future start-ups entering the care technology marketplace in a new industry-focused toolkit.

The EMERGENCE network aims to create a sustainable eco-system of researchers, businesses, end-users, health and social care commissioners and practitioners, policy makers and regulatory bodies in order to build knowledge and capability needed to enable healthcare robots to support people living with frailty in the community. By adopting a person-centred approach to developing healthcare robotics technology we seek to improve the quality of life and independence of older people at risk of, and living with frailty, whilst helping to contain spiralling care costs. Individuals with frailty have different needs but, commonly, assistance is needed in activities related to mobility, self-care and domestic life, social activities and relationships. Healthcare can be enhanced by supporting people to better self-manage the conditions resulting from frailty, and improving information and data flow between individuals and healthcare practitioners, enabling more timely interventions. Providing cost-effective and high-quality support for an aging population is a high priority issue for the government. The lack of adequate social care provisions in the community and funding cuts have added to the pressures on an already overstretched healthcare system. The gaps in ability to deliver the requisite quality of care, in the face of a shrinking care workforce, have been particularly exposed during the ongoing Covid-19 crisis. Healthcare robots are increasingly recognised as solutions in helping people improve independent living, by having the ability to offer physical assistance as well as supporting complex self-management and healthcare tasks when integrated with patient data. The EMERGENCE network will foster and facilitate innovative research and development of healthcare robotic solutions so that they can be realised as pragmatic and sustainable solutions providing personalised, affordable and inclusive health and social care in the community. We will work with our clinical partners and user groups to translate the current health and social care challenges in assessing, reducing and managing frailty into a set of clear and actionable requirements that will inspire novel research and enable engineers to develop appropriate healthcare robotics solutions. We will also establish best practice guidelines for informing the design and development of healthcare robotics solutions, addressing assessment, reduction and self-management of frailty and end-user interactions for people with age-related sensory, physical and cognitive impairments. This will help the UK develop cross-cutting research capabilities in ethical design, evaluation and production of healthcare robots. To enable the design and evaluation of healthcare robotic solutions we will utilize the consortium's living lab test beds. These include the Assisted Living Studio in the Bristol Robotics Lab covering the South West, the National Robotarium in Edinburgh together with the Health Innovation South East Scotland's Midlothian test bed, the Advanced Wellbeing Research Centre and HomeLab in Sheffield, and the Robot House at the University of Hertfordshire covering the South East. Up to 10 funded feasibility studies will drive co-designed, high quality research that will lead to technologies capable of transforming community health and care. The network will also establish safety and regulatory requirements to ensure that healthcare robotic solutions can be easily deployed and integrated as part of community-based frailty care packages. In addition, we will identify gaps in the skills set of carers and therapists that might prevent them from using robotic solutions effectively and inform the development of training content to address these gaps. This will foster the regulatory, political and commercial environments and the workforce skills needed to make the UK a global leader in the use of robotics to support the government's ageing society grand challenge.