SCET - Portfolio

NHS Self Help Guide

SCET has worked with Scottish Government’s Unscheduled Care team and NHS24 to develop a Self-Help guide. The aim of the self-help guide is to make a difference to the management of those conditions that present frequently to primary and secondary care and to reduce unnecessary attendances to GPs and Emergency Departments.
The NHS Self-Help Guide has information and advice on some of the more common symptoms that people call NHS24 about. The app is very easy to use and guides you through a set of questions about your symptoms that are exactly those asked by NHS24 call-handlers. All medical information held within the app is continuously updated in real-time to align with NHS24 algorithms. The app also allows you to search for your nearest GPs, pharmacies, dentists, out-of-hours services, minor injuries units and emergency (A&E) departments within Scotland. This app provides useful information but is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. If you think you may have a medical emergency, immediately call your doctor or dial 999.

A Patient with Dementia - VR Experience

A patient with dementia is a 360 Degree VR film experience that places the viewer in the place of an 85-year-old female with dementia in a hospital ward-based environment. The main goal of this experience is to capture the harrowing perspective of an elderly patient suffering from dementia. This project was made for Edinburgh Napier University for their student nurses to better empathise and understand the viewpoint and distressing experience of a patient with dementia to manage their care more effectively.

Decision Support for Health and Social Care

Scotland's Go To Platform for Quality Assured Decision Support Tools for Health and Social Care.
IT offers development approach and standards-based architecture used to create decision support solutions in Scotland’s health and social care. It highlights the role of the Right Decision platform www.rightdecision.scot.nhs.uk as the Go-To-place for finding, sharing and building quality assured decision support resources.

Pasma VR Animation

PASMA (Prefabricated Access Suppliers’ and Manufacturers’ Association) is the recognised focus and authority for mobile access towers. PASMA advances safety, standards and best practice across a wide range of sectors and represents the interests of its members in the UK, South Africa, South East Asia and the Middle East. To support PASMA’s online Towers for Users course, SCET has developed a serious game that allows trainees to gain knowledge and skills in building and dismantling mobile access towers in preparation for the practical session of the course when they have to physically build/dismantle a tower. The game has two modes: one for practicing building/dismantling towers and a second mode whether the trainee is given a number of different scenarios and they are asked to navigate their way to the best solution. The game has been developed in Unity and is available for Windows, Mac and mobile platforms. The tower building mode is also available in Virtual Reality through the HTC Vive.

Let’s Think Ahead – My ACP

SCET has worked with Health Improvement Scotland to develop the Let’s Think Ahead – My ACP app. My ACP supports people to plan ahead for changes in their health and care needs. The app allows users to create an Anticipatory Care Plan or ACP and update the plan at any time. It also contains a journal function, and allows the individual to record appointments (eg. with their GP) with reminders when the appointments are due. The app is available for iOS and Android phones and tablets.

Self Directed Support Scrapbook

My SDS is a mobile 2D Game that was created for Glasgow Centre for Inclusive Living to encourage the younger generation with a wide range of disabilities to be more forthcoming in regards to sharing their feeling around their future aspirations. This will allow a Carer/Personal Assistant to encourage and work with individuals to be confident enough to start the journey down their chosen path.

Safer Maternity Care

Early identification and management of the risks associated with pregnancy is essential to providing appropriate treatment to pregnant women. In Scotland there are six areas that have been targeted for improved maternal care: post-partum haemorrhage, stillbirth, sepsis, venous thromboembolism, smoking cessation and appropriate induction of labour. Effective identification of maternal risk and its subsequent management is guided by nationally recognised evidence and best practice. However, with so much evidence and practice guidelines available, health care staff can be overwhelmed by bureaucracy and can miss key clinical factors. Risk assessment is frequently carried out in an ad hoc manner, and is not always undertaken.

SCET has worked with NHS Borders and NHS Education Scotland to develop the SAFER (Safe Assessment Form to Evaluate Risk) maternity platform. SAFER is a risk assessment and risk management system that is used to assess antenatal risks and develop a comprehensive clinical management plan. It consists of a clinical decision support rules engine with rules that can be amended by key clinicians for each Healthboard/CCG. The system then allows clinicians (eg. GPs, consultants, midwives) to enter relevant patient information at each hospital appointment during pregnancy and the system with calculate the risk to the pregnant woman and produce an appropriate care management plan. The patient data can be entered both within a primary of secondary care setting using a computer but can also be used in the community on the SAFER app (available on iOS and Android). The patient can also use the app to see their care management plan.

My Cyber Safe Space

This game will allow for the players to build an understanding of online safety by playing real-world scenarios and making narratively driven choices to drive learning. Throughout the game the player will be confronted by instances or scenarios, they can make their own choices and choose their own path and learning by playing other case studies or stories that individuals have lived and subsequently learned from. The game will mirror the real world. Set in a bedroom with all current forms of communicative technology. The player will be asked to make important decisions, each choice has a negative or positive response. Throughout the game, the player’s choices are tracked. These can be reviewed post playthrough by the users, a carer, teacher etc. The game can highlight problem areas within an individual.

Community Eye Care

Working in partnership with NHS Grampian, NHS Forth Valley and NHS Education Scotland, SCET has developed the Community Eye Care website (https://communityeyecare.scot.nhs.uk/) and app (available on iOS and Android) to help improve standardisation, accessibility, usability and currency of primary care optometry clinical guidelines and pathways so that they can be better accessed by primary and secondary care on computers, mobile phones and tablet devices. The guidelines have been adapted, with permission, from the College of Optometrist’s clinical management guidelines, to incorporate pragmatic experience gained from NHS Grampian’s Eye Health Network.

Since 2007, NHS Grampian’s Eye Health Network has provided care for many thousands of patients and, through the introduction of Local Enhanced Service Agreements, has allowed the treatment of acute anterior uveitis, herpes simplex keratitis and marginal keratitis, in association with general practice, within the primary care setting. Elsewhere in Scotland, community optometrists are increasingly working in partnership with their colleagues in ophthalmology. Independent prescribing for optometry was introduced in 2008. The introduction of standardised pathways will not only help guide optometric independent prescribers to use their new-found skills in the most appropriate manner, but also help guide whether to treat in the community or refer onwards.

Real-Time Monitoring Platform for Diabetes

Diabetes is a long term condition that affects the body’s ability to process glucose. People with diabetes have an increased risk of developing a number of serious health problems. Consistently high blood glucose levels can lead to serious diseases affecting the heart and blood vessels, eyes, kidneys, nerves and teeth. In addition, people with diabetes also have a higher risk of developing infections. In almost all high-income countries, diabetes is a leading cause of cardiovascular disease, blindness, kidney failure, and lower limb amputation. Maintaining blood glucose levels close to normal can help delay or prevent diabetes complications. Therefore people with diabetes need to perform regular blood glucose monitoring to allow them to keep their glucose levels controlled and to inform their treatment changes.

The International Diabetes Federation (IDF) and International Study for Paediatric and Adolescent Diabetes (IPSAD) 2011 Guideline for Diabetes in Childhood and Adolescence recommend self-monitoring of blood glucose as an essential tool for the management of diabetes in these groups. They recognise that without regular monitoring the risks of acute diabetes crises and long term complications are increased. Any strategy therefore that would encourage more frequent blood glucose testing and lead to improved glucose control in young people with diabetes would be welcome.

Initially in collaboration with NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, we have developed a real-time monitoring platform for diabetes and other long-term conditions that allows clinicians to monitor their patients in real-time. The platform collects data from patients, such as their blood glucose level, urine ketone level or blood ketone level, blood pressure, temperature and pulse. This data is sent to a server for analysis using National Institute for Health Care Excellence (NICE) guidelines and alerts raised if any readings are outside normal limits (the clinician can customise these limits for each of their patients). A real-time dashboard is provided to let a clinician see the health of their patients at any time. The platform also provides private text messaging and video conferencing between clinician and patient.

This platform is now available under license. For any enquiries, please email: Professor Thomas M Connolly (thomas.connolly@uws.ac.uk)

Puzzley: Jigsaw

Puzzley:Jigsaw is our first Android/iOS game in the ‘Puzzley’ franchise. Focusing around all things jigsaw, Puzzley:Jigsaw offers players traditional jigsaw features with a twist. Finding static images easy? Try our animated puzzles for some added difficulty. Create your own ‘story’ by turning your own pictures into a puzzle for you to solve. Along with our extensive library of images filtered by colour, theme, location, there will always be a jigsaw to solve in Puzzley:Jigsaw.

Job Fantasyland

Job FantasyLand is a 2D Android/iOS game that focuses on helping the player decide what types of jobs they may wish to pursue. Aimed at 12-18 year olds, this game offers a wide range of insight into the type of skills and qualifications needed for over 30 jobs. The game also helps match players to jobs they would be suited for by gathering information in fun and creative ways, following the player’s journey as they travel through numerous locations.

Immersive Anxiety Relief

This VR prototype based on existing hardware that replicates flickering light and sound stimulation to alleviate symptoms of anxiety and stress. Clinical studies show light and sound stimulation reduces symptoms when the subject is exposed to certain frequencies repeatedly over a period of time. SCET has digitise this experience by placing the user in a safe virtual environment
This is the first time a VR product of this nature has been researched and developed, making it highly innovative and potentially game changing to the healthcare industry. This is a highly effective, non-invasive solution that will demonetise mental healthcare by providing an easily available and deliverable solution to a problem not just prevalent within the UK, but throughout the world.

Active Independant Management System

The Scottish Centre for Enabling Technology (SCET) at the University of the West of Scotland (UWS) and NHS Lanarkshire (NHSL) have agreed to work together to develop a new system of managing patient rehabilitation called AIMS (Active and Independent Management System), specifically focusing on the following areas:

Orthopaedic elective and trauma
COPD
Care of the elderly
The aim of the project is to build a re-enablement platform that uses a whole systems approach to address the ‘de-enablement’ that occurs as an in-patient in hospital with the elderly population most at risk of this. It will have multiple modules of interdisciplinary input that will deliver an MDT approach to re-enablement. We know that malnutrition, sarcopenia and functional decline is a massive issue in acute and rehabilitation wards and as such has been termed ‘pyjama paralysis’.

We are building a re-enablement platform that will increase the intensity, improve the efficiency and give clear accountability for a patient’s re-enablement from the acute hospital and following discharge into the community. The anticipated result is better outcomes (the quicker and more effective the rehabilitation received, the better the outcome for the patient). It is hoped that this will be reflected in shorter hospital stays and a decrease in re-admissions.

The proposed project will create an online system to help manage patients’ rehabilitation programmes. Each patient will be given a unique ID at the beginning of their patient pathway and the system will then be able to collect certain information about the patient as they move through their journey. The rehabilitation staff will be able to use this platform to build, monitor and advance the individual rehabilitation package required for the patient. A team of stakeholders will be assigned to each patient and will become responsible for the delivery of the programme. A library of physiotherapy exercises and educational videos for example, use of a walking aid or how to apply a patient’s splint will be recorded and uploaded into the system. This will then allow the staff member to attach a series of videos specific to the patient that can facilitate the re-enablement process

The platform will also have nutritional information in-putted for the patient so that their nutritional status can be monitored throughout the re enablement process. This will have the functionality to measure calorific intake and food source.

Cancer Referral Guide

The guidelines were developed by a multidisciplinary team and facilitate appropriate referral between primary and secondary care for patients with a suspected cancer. SCET collaboratively developed the Android, iOS app and backend web content management system with the NHS SHOW team. The app is are aimed at supporting GPs, the wider primary care team, other clinicians and carers.