̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Cambridge Engineering Design Centre

Cambridge Festival Speaker Spotlight: Dr Itab Shuayb

zs332 — Wed, 19 Mar 2025 09:25:01 +0000

Dr Itab Shuayb is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Engineering Design Centre at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge. She is also a professor of inclusive design at the department of architecture and design at the American ̽��ֱ�� of Beirut. An inclusive design specialist, access consultant and activist. She has led a number of architecture projects and awareness campaigns in Lebanon focusing on improving accessibility and promoting inclusive environments for diverse users.

CamFest Speaker Spotlight: Matteo Zallio

zs332 — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 08:25:22 +0000

Matteo Zallio is an award-winning designer and researcher, dedicated to promoting accessibility and inclusivity in emergent technologies.

What is the metaverse – and will it help us or harm us?

lw355 — Thu, 27 Jul 2023 07:52:28 +0000

An interconnected world of extended reality is coming that will reshape how we work, play and communicate – and expose us to new levels of risk. What is the metaverse? Will we be safe? How do we make the most of it?

A retrofitting revolution

cg605 — Thu, 06 Oct 2022 12:01:37 +0000

Laying the foundations for buildings to stay cool in extreme heat.

Beyond the pandemic: re-design our public health system

ta385 — Wed, 09 Dec 2020 09:25:18 +0000

COVID-19 has highlighted debilitating flaws in England’s public health systems decades in the making. Carol Brayne and John Clarkson from Cambridge Public Health, a new interdisciplinary centre, argue that a radical rethink is long overdue. They recommend bringing a ‘systems approach’ to the challenges, to help make our public health system fit for the future – for everyone.

Physician, heal thyself: engineering a new National Health Service

Anonymous — Tue, 19 Mar 2019 11:00:00 +0000

Alongside the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, Indian Railways and Walmart, the NHS ranks among the world’s largest employers. In England, it treats more than 1.4 million patients every 24 hours and will this year spend £126 billion. But as communities gathered to celebrate the NHS’s 70th birthday in 2018, reports continued to emerge on the ailing health of this much-loved national institution.

Analysis by another national treasure, the BBC, revealed that nearly one in five hospital trusts were failing to hit any of their key waiting-time targets. Hospitals seemed to be lurching towards over-crowded A&Es, bed shortages and queuing ambulances unable to hand over their patients.

Two ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge researchers have a grand vision to rethink the system to make it fit for the next 70 years – a vision that’s rooted in research with local patients and doctors.

Professor Stefan Scholtes works at Cambridge Judge Business School and Dr Alexander Komashie is at the ̽��ֱ��’s Engineering Design Centre. Both are engineers by training, both have spent the past 10 years studying different parts of the local healthcare system and both are passionate believers that, as researchers, they can help make the NHS better.

System design

̽��ֱ��NHS faces numerous challenges but the real test, says Komashie, is understanding how to design better delivery systems by working with patients. “That’s where engineering comes in,” he says. “Engineers excel in designing large systems that work well, from worldwide telecommunications networks to the Airbus A380. What motivates me is translating the engineering practice of a systems approach into healthcare.”

̽��ֱ��first step is understanding the system requirements. “It sounds obvious, but to design a system to do something you need to understand what it is you want,” Komashie explains. “In engineering, a lot of effort goes into defining what the system should do. When you understand that, you can ask how the system is set up to deliver it.”

Komashie has applied this systems engineering approach to adult mental health services within the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust (CPFT), and ran a series of workshops for patients and clinicians. Patients’ stories allow him to unpack each component of the delivery system and represent them in visual diagrams so that services can be improved in a systematic way. ̽��ֱ��project was funded and supported by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) East of England Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care (CLAHRC), hosted by CPFT.

“My goal is developing a new way of describing the system, and hearing people talk about their experience of care helps me understand it. If through patient and public involvement, we can get rich enough stories, it gives us a window into the system behind the story,” says Komashie, who has recently been awarded an interdisciplinary fellowship for research into health systems visualisation at ̽��ֱ��Healthcare Improvement Studies Institute (THIS Institute). “Hearing patients’ accounts of what matters most helps to ensure the system designs and delivers the support they need.”

Sarah Rae, CPFT Expert by Experience, worked closely with Komashie in bridging the gap between the academic researcher and the patient participants. “As workshop co-facilitator I gave the participants a better understanding of the research by helping them to make the connection between systems engineering and mental health,” she says. “Sharing my own lived experience of mental health also helped the participants feel more comfortable about describing their experiences authentically.”

Komashie is now taking the tools he developed in mental health and applying them to vascular surgery and spinal cord injuries at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge and holistic neuropsychological rehabilitation at ̽��ֱ��Princess of Wales Hospital’s Oliver Zangwill Centre in Ely.

Working with GP practices

Headlines about NHS waiting times, bed shortages and ambulance queues invariably focus on capacity, which Scholtes argues is a misdiagnosis. “People say we’ve got a capacity problem but that’s wrong. We have a complexity problem. There are so many things going on simultaneously but pulling in different directions. Complexity is killing hospitals.”

At Addenbrooke’s, for example, where Scholtes spent three sabbaticals over the past 10 years, the hospital does everything from pulling wisdom teeth to multiple organ transplants. He argues that delivering this breadth of services in a system already at full stretch is impossible. Instead, hospitals need to be “decomplexified” by delivering most of their routine services in community settings.

It sounds simple, but it’s not. “ ̽��ֱ��problem is that there’s no landing space. We have 92 GP practices locally, so how can you move work currently centralised in a large hospital to 92 small businesses? It’s impossible. ̽��ֱ��only way to make headway is to scale up primary care so that it can take on more responsibility,” says Scholtes.

This is exactly what he’s doing with Granta Medical Practices, a large Cambridgeshire GP practice where he spent his most recent sabbatical evaluating the practice’s innovative operational and business model.

A critical barrier to change in primary care is the traditional GP partnership model, he says. By leaving GP partners with unlimited liability, the model creates risk aversion and hampers transformative change. In response, Granta is developing an innovative business model – an employee-owned trust akin to the John Lewis Partnership – which could enable it to deliver 70% of routine outpatient activity in the community and cut by 25% the number of emergency bed days among its patients.

Dr James Morrow, CEO of Granta Medical Practices, describes how Granta Medical Practices has gained enormously from working closely with Sholtes and his colleagues at the Cambridge Judge Business School: “Several of our senior clinicians have participated in formal educational programmes through the Judge and have brought back insights and skills from other sectors. Stefan’s sabbatical with the practice has refined and clarified our thinking around not just service delivery and user-experience but also helped with developing our longer term strategic goals as we embark on a period of rapid health system reform.”

But how can transforming Granta help the NHS as a whole? This is where the ̽��ֱ�� comes in, says Scholtes, who hopes to establish a Primary Care Innovation Academy, drawing on research expertise from across the ̽��ֱ��.

̽��ֱ��Academy would provide leadership and management training for GPs, practice managers and lead nurses, and also ensure that interventions taken to transform the local primary care system are robustly evaluated. As such, it would add to the ̽��ֱ��’s increasing capacity in creating the evidence base for improving healthcare. For instance, THIS Institute is focusing on how to improve quality and safety across the system.

A “radically different” NHS

Addenbrooke’s Hospital itself has been transformed over the past three decades with a major emphasis on recruiting clinical academics in partnership with the ̽��ֱ��, who split their time between practising medicine and carrying out research.

Professor Patrick Maxwell, Head of the School of Clinical Medicine, explains: “Clinical academics have been central to the development of tertiary referral services and a major trauma centre. This has helped to create an excellent district and regional hospital with outcomes that are among the best in the country. Currently our priorities include improving prevention and early diagnosis of diseases, so that fewer patients need hospital services.”

Meanwhile, in January 2019, the NHS released its new 10-year plan, which included aims to boost ‘out-of-hospital’ care through increased investment in primary medical and community health services.

All in all, Scholtes believes that, by the time the NHS reaches its 80th birthday, it could look radically different: hospitals could be doing 60% of what they do now by focusing on cases that can only be treated in hospital and on cutting-edge treatments and research, while more integrated, scaled-up primary care practices will be taking full responsibility for out-of-hospital care.

“If this work is successful, it has the potential to bring the local health economy back onto a sustainable path by establishing a new model of primary care that can be scaled throughout the NHS,” he concludes. “It’s ambitious – but we can do it.”

̽��ֱ��National Health Service turned 70 in 2018 – but, amid the celebrations, its health is faltering. By working closely with local hospitals and GPs, researchers at Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� are developing bold new ideas they believe will help the NHS thrive for decades to come.

If this work is successful, it has the potential to bring the local health economy back onto a sustainable path by establishing a new model of primary care that can be scaled throughout the NHS

Stefan Scholtes

Emily

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̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Black researchers shaping the future

ta385 — Wed, 10 Oct 2018 09:32:12 +0000

Read the full story here

As the UK marks Black History Month, researchers from across the ̽��ֱ�� talk about their route to Cambridge, their inspiration and their motivation.

̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge researchers

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Newly-developed image guidelines will improve mobile shopping experience worldwide

sc604 — Wed, 07 Feb 2018 02:53:29 +0000

̽��ֱ��concept, known as ‘mobile ready hero images’, was designed to make shopping for grocery products faster, by making it easier to quickly spot key information about a product, such as size, type or flavour.

For example, searching for ‘soap’ on Amazon or other retail websites will bring up hundreds of images, and most customers will scroll quickly through the list on their phone in order to find the particular item they want. However, based on product images alone, it can be difficult to quickly spot the differences between items: whether an item contains one, three or ten individual bars of soap, for instance.

“While traditional pack photographs can be effective on desktop screens, different flavours and sizes of products can look identical when these photographs are displayed on mobiles, reduced to the size of a postage stamp,” said Dr Sam Waller from Cambridge’s Engineering Design Centre, who led the project. “This is especially problematic for older consumers with age-related long-sightedness.”

To date, mobile ready hero images have been adopted by over 80 retailers in more than 40 countries. India – where 65% of all online shopping transactions take place on mobiles – has been one of the fastest countries to adopt these images.

In addition to making the mobile shopping experience easier for customers, mobile ready hero images have also been shown to have a positive impact on sales. “Magnum ice cream is one of our billion dollar global brands that has adopted hero images,” said Oliver Bradley, e-commerce director at Unilever. “During an eight-week A/B split test with a retailer, Magnum’s hero images led to a sales increase of 24%.”

In order to meet retailers’ demands for consistent product images across all brands, Unilever commissioned Cambridge to develop a website for hero image guidelines, with freely available templates to help brands create improved product images.

To date, some brands have created mobile ready hero images using the Cambridge templates, while others have developed hero images in a different way. Some retailers have chosen to accept all kinds of hero images, while others will only accept some kinds of hero images, resulting in an inconsistent experience for consumers.

GS1, a global non-profit organisation which sets standards for consumer goods, has recently established a working group to focus on mobile ready hero images.

“We spotted the opportunity to improve the current situation using our Global Standards Management Process,” said Paul Reid, head of standards at GS1 in the UK. “ ̽��ֱ��aim of the working group is to get agreement between competing brands and retailers, leading to a single, globally applicable set of guidelines for mobile ready hero images. These guidelines will help brands and retailers make the shopping experience better and more consistent.”

“Inclusive design can help improve the visual clarity of hero images, making them more accessible to a wider range of consumers,” said Waller. “In particular, our SEE-IT method can estimate the proportion of the population who would be unable to discern the important information from e-commerce images. We have joined the GS1 working group in an advisory capacity, and we are looking forward to contributing our expertise to help inform the critical decisions.

“Grocery products are just the start: we want to improve the e-commerce images used for every product, at every retailer, in every country in the world.”

Inset image: Examples of mobile-ready hero images. Walkers is a trademark owned and designed by PepsiCo and used with permission.

A new type of online product image, developed by researchers at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge in collaboration with global consumer goods company Unilever, could improve the mobile shopping experience for the world’s 2.5 billion smartphone users.

We want to improve the e-commerce images used for every product, at every retailer, in every country in the world.

Sam Waller

Photo by Gilles Lambert on Unsplash

Man on a smartphone

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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