We are fortunate to be tackling the global challenge that COVID-19 presents at a time when technology can provide high-fidelity, real-time, visual, and auditory information at scale; the 'Zoom-call' is essential to daily activity. A particular challenge of remote working is collaborating when direct touch -- either between people or via shared objects and spaces -- is an essential component, whether for medicine, communication, teaching, or design. For the sight-impaired community, many aspects of education, such as art and design courses, are exclusively a "hand's-on" activity. Sharing and communicating design ideas is almost impossible without the ability to "visualize" the creation and for the sight-impaired user to visualize through touch and sound. This means, that in an exclusively audio-visual online world, there is no provision for the sight-impaired to access education which requires sharing and collaborating with 2D or 3D design process, effectively cutting this community off from the benefits of online, digital interaction, that others in the education system take for granted. Indeed, the pace of change is so fast now, traditional, in-person collaborative education spaces are disappearing altogether. We believe there is the opportunity to take state of the art immersive, haptic (touch) technologies to solve challenges in other domains e.g. education and the creative industries, and apply them to create touch-enabled, online digital "maker spaces" aimed at provisioning remote learners with an entirely new platform for education in the disciplines of arts, crafts, design, and engineering. This project will lay the groundwork for addressing this substantial but crucial challenge by working closely with a broad range of stakeholders from the sight-impaired and creative design communities. From this project, we can better understand their current behaviors and how their needs would map onto an online, digital equivalent. We will balance this subjective approach with a more objective investigation into the practicalities by taking an existing, proven technology stack that is being used to experiment with shared, interaction with real-time touch feedback and adjusting it sufficiently to allow designers to experience what a collaborative, online 3D touch-enabled design space might be like. We will combine these two strands to form a clear understanding of a strategy to go forward and address the exciting but substantial challenge of opening the digital collaborative experience, not just the sight-impaired, but any design practitioner who would benefit from the internet where touch is not as well provisioned as sight and sound today.

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Emergency preparedness training is fundamental to success in a pandemic such as COVID-19. The NHS Nightingale London provides a fresh challenge to large-scale healthcare-related training. Unusually to healthcare, it has brought together professionals from wide ranging medical disciplines in a short period of time for a singular purpose. A replica of the Nightingale was created at the O2 Arena to address these training needs. Educators stationed at the Nightingale aim to train the workforce in COVID-specific competencies. Inevitably, the speed and unpredictable nature of an emergency means the quality, realism and range of procedures that can be supported through training is limited. Virtual Reality (VR) technologies which are portable, setup quickly and easily modifiable could provide unique training opportunities in emergency situations, yet VR has not featured in any UK response to COVID-19 training. Although it has been used in clinical education for over 10 years, uses thus far are bespoke. We are working with teams from NHS Nightingale London, King's College Hospital and King's College London to design and build a modular (software and hardware) platform for the rapid deployment of targeted training interventions in emergency situations. We will use the emergency need for training to inform the design of tools and requirements as we implement carefully selected training scenarios to complement existing training, reducing staff and consumable burden. A major area of which has been highlighted is the need for solutions to the Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) shortage, which is amplified through its use in training. The overall project ambition is that, eventually, creating a 3D training scenario using our toolkit should be equivalent in technical competency and time to creating PowerPoint 2D training materials. Equally, deployment should be simple, scalable and meet all necessary health and safety requirements (e.g. contagion control and decontamination). While we will focus on the needs of NHS Nightingale in the first instance, the effects of COVID-19 (along with other infectious diseases) will likely continue to have a worldwide impact for many years to come. Our vision is to use the outputs of this project and our learning through working with the NHS Nightingale team to create a rapidly deployable and customisable VR training solution that can be put in "on the ground" right where training needs to take place. Thereby enabling the support of e.g. inexperienced volunteers during a Lassa Fever outbreak in Nigeria or a field hospital in a conflict zone. **Extension for Impact** The additional funding and time provided by the extension will allow us to take this project significantly further towards commercialisation. We will be able to: * Run a second pilot at a different NHS trust to demonstrate wider applicability and gather more data/feedback * Actively explore an advertising/sponsorship model through a targeted marketing activity to make training free at point of use * Build out our business plan and supply chain strategy * Continue our collaboration with teams at KCH/KCL to ensure the product has the maximum chance of a successful launch

Stroke is the leading cause of acquired disability in adults, and as such occupies a special place amongst the different types of brain injuries. Problems with arm function (upper limb impairments) are very common after a stroke. Existing advanced neurorehabilitation techniques (physiotherapy being comparatively limited and subjective) share a range of limitations including limited understanding of the underlying mechanisms. The NHS spends 4-6% of overall budget on stroke rehabilitation. Upper limb "circulatory" disorders account for 9% of primary care consultations and present a 55-90% admission rate to hospitals. The **NeuRestore** project proposes to significantly address these limitations by exploring a unique non-invasive brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) approach to exploit electroencephalogram (EEG) patterns to trigger feedback or an action output from an exoskeleton. **NeuRestore** achieves this at a cost of £98k/licenced unit/year (just under the average salary of 2x NHS Advanced-Physiotherapist), while crucially reducing physio waiting times (and resources can be spent elsewhere).

"The sense of touch is our physical connection to the world around us. Haptic technology recreates our sense of touch for the digital world. Haptics in the creative industries has primarily been applied as vibration in computer game feedback and in other niche industry areas (surgical training, flight simulators). As the necessity for touch in immersive experiences becomes clear, interest in haptics is rising. ""HAPPIE"" (**H**aptic **A**uthoring **P**ipeline for the **P**roduction of **I**mmersive **E**xperiences) will enable haptic content to be created faster and more efficiently and provide the software infrastructure to allow smooth and reliable content distribution. HAPPIE will address 3 barriers to enable/accelerate haptics uptake into UK multi-£Bn creative industries. 1.Research and development of device independent haptics middleware enabling futureproof design and purchasing decisions for non-experts. 2.Research and development of device independent haptics authoring tools built on (1) to enable a new category of job ""Haptic artist"". 3.Research and development of a diverse selection of exemplar haptic demonstrations using (1) and (2) above in AR/VR/XR. To inform development and validate the outcome of (1) and (2) and to inspire the UK creative industries as to haptics' wider potential."

Over the next two years the UK has committed to training an extra 1500 medical students, this will bring the total to almost 7500 students per year. It is essential to ensure the competencies of a newly qualified doctor. The concept of 'Black Wednesday' in August refers to the day when a new cohort of junior doctors arrive on the wards. Ensuring the competency of newly qualified doctors improves patient outcomes and reduces harm (improving quality of life). Assessment of competency lacks standardisation across medical schools although projects are starting to address this. The UK medical licensing exam will introduce a common written content examination across medical schools in the next five years. In Parallel to this the general medical council has introduced a list of core clinical competencies for newly qualified doctors. However, there is no standardised national assessment. Numerous additional challenges in assessing clinical skills exist including: ethical (not using patients); mannequin based assessment lacks realism and authenticity; assessment stress is rising resulting in severe mental health implications; objectivity in assessment of clinical skills is hard to standardise with technical failure of equipment and the subjective nature of assessment gives rise to unconscious bias. In recent years rapid development of VR and related technologies have given rise to many new opportunities for medical education. Despite being demonstrably effective since the early 00's, current technologies for medical training are highly specific to a particular clinical skill or discipline. Generic Robotics (GR) have developed a hardware and software simulation platform leveraging VR and Haptics (Touch Feedback) which is the world's first multi-purpose clinical simulator (SimuTouch(r)). A universal platform brings many advantages and changes the way training institutions can invest in and deploy simulation in their curricula. The next frontier for computer simulation is assessment, there is opportunity to address many of the challenges already highlighted but, uniquely, through the SimuTouch(r) platform, there is additionally the opportunity to unify training with assessment bringing even wider efficiency improvements, cost saving and standardization. GR will collaborate closely with expert medical educators at King's College London. This project will begin with a discovery phase using the General Medical Council outcomes for graduates' core medical skills list as the starting point to identify areas for technological exploitation. Approximately 5 skills will be selected for development, split between simpler, VR tasks and more complex Haptic tasks which will then be validated in a mock OSCE.

This project will create the first commercial simulator for training dental injections. Student’s the world over currently learn these techniques by practicing on each other. However, this approach is now being phased out due to ethical concerns and also, even if practiced on humans, there is very opportunity for detailed learning as objective feedback on the performance of the task (e.g. proximity to the target nerve) is lacking. Generic Robotics’ core IP is in haptics, a technology which adds realistic touch feedback to computers. By combining haptics with sophisticated real-time computer graphics it is possible to realistically recreate the visual and tactile sensations arising during clinical procedures. By developing this technology for this specific application it will allow us to create an innovative solution to a global training need. The principle aim of the project is to develop a commercial prototype of a dental injection training simulation platform which works and looks sufficiently like a finished product that it can be demonstrated to potential customers and tested by them without support. However, dental injection is the first target application/market of many which the product will be applied to once developed as part of a novel disruptive business plan in clinical simulation. The secondary aim is to achieve a commercial prototype platform which is general purpose enough to support any small manual skills training application. The principle objectives of the project are: * To develop our core IP in haptic simulation to a commercial ready level of quality and robustness * To complete the product design of a desktop simulator for training injection procedures * To develop our haptic interface hardware (electronics & mechanics) to a commercial ready level of quality and robustness * To investigate and pursue IP protection * Complete rigorous testing with real users * Identify routes to market and steps necessary to bring the prototype to market

Haptics (touch interaction with computers) is an emerging technology which has great potential to revolutionise clinical training by allowing trainees to practice procedures in a reslistic way, repeatedly and a safely. Generic Robotics is developing haptically enabled simulation for clinical training and with innovateUK support is bring products to market. The study is an oportunity to test the feasibility of applying a new type of control system to our haptic interfaces which, if successful, has the potential to significantly widen the the potential uses for our technology as well as making uptake of clinical training a much more viable prospect for training institutions world wide.

Haptic (touch feedback) technology provides an intuitive way to interact with computers. Although in its infancy, haptic technology will play a key role in future HCI. One area, currently not exploited, but with great potential is simplifying HCI experience for disabled users, particularly the visually impaired. Generic Roboticswill design a software API which will allow us to test the feasibility of using our low cost haptic device to interface with a common DTP package to feel the shape of graphs and other commonly used visual presentation elements

Developing and evaluating a prototype haptically enabled computer simulator system for facial injection training, focussing on the procedures related to Botox injection and dermal fillers.

This project seeks to develop a novel high-force haptic interface device suitable for simulating orthopaedic surgical procedures. We will evaluate the potential for commercialising such a simulator system for providing training and assessment of orthopaedic surgical skills.

Touch is fundamental to almost all human interaction with the world and other humans, yet it is an under exploited aspect of human computer interaction. Haptics is the study of how humans physically interact with the world around them and haptic devices allow physical interaction with computer simulations. There are many potential uses for haptics: education, training, rehabilitation, entertainment, disability access (visual and motor impairments), creativity and communication. Advanced haptic interfaces are beginning to transition from research to to commercial applications but many challenges remain before they can be practically used in daily life. Generic Robotics Ltd. are experts in Haptic interfaces and have partnered with the internationally renowned Dental Institute at King’s College London to explore the application of haptics in the training of dentists.

Computers are often used to allow students to experiment with concept. However the interactions are essentially on a flat touch interface such as the Apple iphone (often considered as the state-of-the-art). In contrast we live in a 3D world so, for example, when we chop a carrot, each hand needs to control spatial forces, torques, positions and orientation. Representing similar activities in computer simulations has largely been restricted to medical education where a surgeon can practice their skills in a virtual world before he or she is allowed near a patient. Recently work has showed the need for a high quality haptic device in education and Generic Robotics has demonstrated how this can be achieved at an acceptable cost. Success of such a haptic device would enhance scientific education in UK schools and universities as well as creating opportunities for other UK business.