Funding body: NIHR i4i Product Development Award
Funding amount: £26,847.18
Project duration: 6 months
The REBoot project emphasises the needs of a rare disease group who live with Epidermolysis Bullosa (EB) and require life-long health care resources. EB is a group of genetic skin conditions which cause the skin to blister and tear at the slightest touch. The patients with EB suffer from skin blistering, webbing between toes, dystrophic nails, and ultimately gait imbalances. All of these are accompanied by significant pain.
The aim of this project is to help the EB patients preventing or delaying disease-related deformities and disabilities with medical devices and orthotics. It is a project spanning multiple Faculties at King’s, including Florence Nightingale Faculty of Nursing and Midwifery, Dental Institute, Department of Informatics, and in collaboration with clinical consultants, footwear designers and engineers from NHS Foundation Trust, OurOwnsKIN Ltd and Walk With Path, and also the patients.
The Robot learning lab is involved in this project to support the research and development of IT applications, sensing technologies and dynamic gait analysis tools to boost the medical devices design aiming at assisting patients with long-term and progressive conditions to avoid loss of function, and correct gaits through tailored footwears. In particular, we are interested in the sensing technologies which are robust, durable and suitable for footwear force mapping and real time data acquisition.
