King's College London

As societies grapple with increasing aged and multimorbid populations, assistive mobility devices could transform lives for millions affected by advanced illness and disability towards end of life. Falls and fear of falling cause injury, death, deconditioning and a ‘shrinking world’ for people with serious illness, at major societal cost.

Poor design features of existing mobility devices cause poor uptake, stigma, and may even increase the risk of falls. Health engineering research and markets have failed to transform assistive mobility devices for the future. High-end products incorporating smart technologies and robotics are too costly and do not respond to user needs or priorities.

We aim to improve the quality, acceptability and uptake of assistive devices to support indoor and outdoor mobility for people living with advanced illness.

The objectives are to:

• Elicit design features required by people with advanced illness
• Identify the most promising technological innovations focusing on frugal/low-tech solutions; and deliver design briefs to develop and evaluate new products for the market. 

This project is part of the 'Careforce', 'Communities' and 'Frugal Innovations' clusters within King’s Better Health & Care Futures.

Scoping review: will explore and map the existing literature on the use of assistive technologies to support independence in palliative and end-of-life care. It aims to identify the types of assistive technologies used and their target outcomes including quality of life. The review will also highlight gaps in the current research to inform future studies and best practices in palliative and end-of-life care.

Qualitative study: Focus groups with people with advanced illness and their unpaid/family carers who have been referred to St Christopher’s Hospice and accessed their services. We will recruit participants from St Christopher’s Hospice, a non-NHS organisation which provides services for people with advanced, progressive and life limiting illness. Participants will be recruited from both St Christopher’s Hospice sites, in Sydenham and Orpington.

Sandpit and grant development: Hybrid event to share integrated findings from the above studies, to inform work with 15-20 stakeholders from diverse disciplines (e.g. health, technology design, engineering, sociology) and backgrounds (e.g. service users, prescribers, industry, practitioners) and generate a design brief for design, development and testing of new assistive device(s) for mobility.

This research will contribute to: a prototype walking aid design ready to test in a future study. 

We will produce:

• Publications on technology-enhanced assistive devices to support mobility, and barriers and facilitators to use in advanced illness.
• A design brief for the production and testing of novel assistive devices fit for the future