The Global Research Institute in Health and Care Technologies was established to accelerate the advancements of research and is dedicated to facilitating the development of new technologies. Through collaborations with healthcare industry experts, stakeholders, charities and academics it has begun addressing critical global health challenges. Through a collaborative approach, their goal is to continue delivering innovative and sustainable healthcare solutions.

This Showcase event will shine a spotlight on The Global Research Institute in Health and Care Technologies and the research underway designed to address some of the most pressing challenges in global healthcare.

Keynote speakers include Professor Sir Chris Whitty, Chief Medical Officer for England and Chief Medical Adviser and Head of the Public Health Profession for the UK Government, and speaker David Dent, a previous member of the Queen Alexandra’s Royal Army Nursing Corps, Honorary Professor at Stirling University Business School and Executive Director for Paraxel Biotech. You will hear from Dubai representatives and also have the opportunity to engage with interactive demonstrations and network with academics from within the Global Research Institute in Health and Care Technologies.

The day will feature research breakthroughs and technology demonstrations, including photonics solutions enhancing clinical precision, next-generation smart health sensors driving real-time diagnostics, and advanced microfluidics revolutionising biomedical workflows. You will also have the option to join a tour of the Immersive Suite, featuring a state-of-the-art patient simulator and a dynamic projection system. This cutting-edge facility can recreate a wide range of environments, serving as a powerful hub for co-design and testing.

The event will offer networking opportunities, allowing you to connect with researchers, industry leaders, and stakeholders driving impactful change in healthcare. ​

If you would like to find out more about The Global Research Institute in Health and Care Technologies, please visit Health and Care Technologies | Heriot-Watt University

Amelia Whitelaw, Director of Interface will be attending this event.

On Wednesday, 2nd October 2024, Heriot-Watt University is staging the Health Ageing Showcase an afternoon dedicated to research that promotes health and wellbeing as we age.

The Healthy Ageing Showcase offers an opportunity to hear from the people leading and participating in a range of research projects. These include developing and trialling new and innovative technologies that support and enhance healthy lifestyles, to the ways our homes and urban environments can be designed to encourage opportunities for healthy ageing, to robotic and assistive devices enabling people with different needs to live independently for longer.

The event will be opened by Professor Linda Bauld (Chief Social Policy Advisor to the Scottish Government), followed by researchers representing the breadth and depth of activities in healthy ageing at Heriot-Watt. The event will also include a special session led by Katherine Crawford (Chief Executive Officer of Age Scotland) celebrating the involvement of people in shaping research.

Event Schedule: Main Programme Commences: 14:00 in the James Watt Auditorium

During the event, there will be an extended break to allow participants to engage with interactive demonstrations and stands. These will cover research from Heriot-Watt as well as opportunities to meet with our community and charity partners. Refreshments will be provided during the break.

The event is being hosted by Heriot-Watt’s Health and Care Technologies Global Research Institute. The institute’s goal is to deliver innovative, sustainable, and user-inspired solutions through a co-creative approach. To learn more about Health and Care Technologies at Heriot-Watt, visit https://www.hw.ac.uk/uk/research/health-and-care-technology.htm.

Join Heriot-Watt University and Interface on 9th October for this Industry-Collaborative Research Breakfast.

With connections into all Scotland’s universities, colleges and research institutes, Interface is based regionally to support businesses by building collaborations with academia.

Louise Arnold and Howell Davies of Interface will share how the Interface team works with Scotland’s universities, colleges and research institutes to encourage and support academics to undertake knowledge exchange activities with businesses.

Interface can help you navigate the business landscape, find business connections and enable access to industry and sector groups. In addition, the team manage funding calls on behalf of Scottish Funding Council, Scottish Enterprise and Scottish Government and can identify funding in support of new and sustained academic and business innovation collaborations.

If you are seeking to progress your research by applying it to important social, commercial, and environmental challenges, looking for industry partners for collaborative R&D or seeking insights about industry needs and challenges, need support in finding opportunities to engage your students or help identify collaborative funding programmes Interface can support you.

A one-day event for academics from the Universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Heriot-Watt, St Andrews, and Strathclyde. Hear impact success stories, find a collaboration partner from another Scottish university, and access funds for impact collaborations.

The festival will be held on 4 September 2024 at COSLA, Edinburgh Haymarket and will support you to:

• find out more about the opportunities, funding and training available to you to create impact from your research
• become a future impact leader
• network with like-minded researchers from five Scottish universities with EPSRC Impact Acceleration Accounts (IAAs)

Interface will be exhibiting at the festival please come along and say hello!

The Business & Enterprise Breakfast Briefing being held at Heriot Watt University Scottish Borders Campus is a unique opportunity for industry leaders and businesses to engage directly with one of the UK’s leading universities in fostering innovation and enterprise.

Why Attend?

• Networking Opportunities: Connect with business leaders, innovators, and academics to expand your professional network.
• Insight into Cutting-Edge Research: Gain insights from pioneering research in sustainable design, medical technology, advanced photonics, and more, showcasing how these can translate into tangible benefits for your business.
• Tour of Innovations: Post-event, take the opportunity to visit the school’s degree showcase.

Key Features:

• Explore the Global Research Innovation Discovery (GRID) ecosystem, Heriot-Watt’s answer to making our university accessible and easy to work in partnership with.
• Hear from some leading academics and researchers on how the university is driving global innovations from across our campuses.
• Discover partnership opportunities across talent and skills, research and development and consultancy IP and licensing. Find out about Graduate Apprenticeships, Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTPs), and bespoke consultancy services that can propel your business forward.
• Learn about unlocking government-funded initiatives and how these can benefit your business operations and growth.

Who Should Attend?

This briefing is ideal for Chief Officers, Directors, Business Owners, R&D leaders, and anyone interested in the successful intersection of academia and industry. Whether you’re from a start-up or an established company, you’ll find valuable insights and opportunities for collaboration.

A“Cane to Cask” rum producer with a commitment to sustainability and a focus on high-quality raw materials, Matugga aims to leave an indelible mark on the international drinks marketplace.

Background

Husband and wife team, Paul and Jacine Rutasikwa, co-founded the Matugga Distillery in 2018, and were one of the first in the UK to produce rum from scratch. Based in Livingston the Matugga Distillery produces a multi-award-winning range of handcrafted spirits with distinctive character and flavours which are distributed across the UK and Europe.

The company is also developing a sugar cane estate on family land in Uganda that will employ and train local agricultural workers. By harvesting cane from its family land and converting it into high quality distilling molasses the company will become a “Cane to Cask” rum producer. With a commitment to sustainability and a focus on high-quality raw materials, Matugga aims to leave an indelible mark on the international drinks marketplace.

Matugga’s initiatives detailed below, supported by Interface’s introductions to academia and various funds, showcase the distillery’s commitment to sustainability, innovation, and social responsibility.

The Challenge – Pot Ale Utilisation

A pressing issue for Matugga is the management of liquid by-products, a challenge since their inception in 2018. Facing escalating disposal costs and a potential surge in liquid volume due to expansion plans, Matugga partnered with Heriot-Watt University. Through the Food & Drink Net Zero Challenge Fund, they explored sustainable alternatives for pot ale, including potential uses in animal feed and biogas, offering additional income streams.

The Solution

Heriot-Watt University’s research looked into characterizing Matugga’s pot ale, proposing solutions that added value while considering the environmental impact. The exploration encompassed biogas, feed/food applications, and new product feedstock potential. The goal was to create a sustainable value chain for pot ale, akin to Scotch whisky distillers.

The research led by Heriot-Watt University provides Matugga with a sustainable solution for pot ale, aligning with their commitment to environmental responsibility. This breakthrough has far-reaching implications for both Matugga and the wider Scottish rum distillery community.

The Benefits

A potential path has been identified which can enable Matugga to return their pot ale into the value chain similar to how Scotch whisky distillers can, ensuring sustainability.

This not only benefits Matugga’s expansion plans but also holds promise for other current and future Scottish rum distilleries.

Overall Impact

Interface have been instrumental in assisting Matugga Distillers with several other research and development opportunities which include:

• A major collaborative project with Scotland’s Rural College (SRUC), supported by the Healthier Products Innovation Fund.
• A group project with University of Edinburgh MBA students to look at strategic marketing of spirits for a younger generation.
• A collaboration with Queen Margaret University centred around diversifying their rum portfolio and offerings, funded by an Innovation Voucher.

Matugga’s initiatives, supported by Interface’s introductions to academia and various funds, showcase the distillery’s commitment to sustainability, innovation, and social responsibility.

Matugga Distillery’s journey is a testament to the power of collaboration, innovation, and sustainability in the spirits industry. Through strategic partnerships and leveraging Interface’s support, Matugga has not only overcome challenges but has emerged as a leader, setting new standards for environmentally conscious and socially responsible distilleries in the UK.

The Net Zero Food & Drink Challenge Fund

The Net Zero Food & Drink Challenge Fund was launched in FY2022/23 by Interface and the Scotland Food and Drink Partnership to support businesses to accelerate their journey towards Net Zero utilising the knowledge base across Scottish Academia. It funded 17 projects of up to £10k each.

Projects were carried out between businesses and academia to improve their environmental credentials through the sustainable measures and learnings taken as a result of their projects. Type of impacts have varied from CO2 Capture, CO2 reduction, Energy Reduction and renewable energy benefits, alternative uses and adding value to waste, and sustainable farming techniques.

Danu Robotics is developing a revolutionary robotic waste sorting system to help the waste management industry significantly increase their productivity, prevent valuable resources going into landfill, boost the circular economy and clean up the environment.

Background

The world generates 3 billion tonnes of domestic solid waste annually, less than 10% of it is recycled. Worldwide, recycling sites require human intervention to pick out contaminants, which can pose health risks and is extremely inefficient.

Xiaoyan Ma founder of Edinburgh-based, clean tech company Danu Robotics, has combined her expertise in high performance computing (HPC) with her passion for the environment to revolutionise the efficiency of the recycling sector by developing an AI-powered, robotic sorting system.

She explained: “I have been a committed environmentalist since I was a teenager and always recycled my household waste, but I’d never thought about where it ended up. So, a couple of years ago, while I was studying, I decided to look into the whole process, and I was shocked at how inefficient it was.”

The Challenge

As a team of one, Xiaoyan needed help in identifying additional resources to support the development of the robotic solution. She required both experts in robotics and hardware development. She also called for help with software development and computer vision expertise. Experts in advanced data analytics and image recognition capability, would help develop a more accurate machine learning algorithm and object classification to enable the robotic system to differentiate between recyclable materials and general waste.

Following an introduction from John Hill, her student enterprise advisor at Edinburgh Innovations, Interface made several connections to different academic teams to support Danu Robotics on their journey of development.

The Solution

Interface connected Danu Robotics into the Design Manufacturing & Engineering Management (DMEM) department, at the University of Strathclyde. The DMEM students undertook a six-month project researching and developing the robotic picker equipped with a camera to identify objects and an appropriate algorithm to instruct the picker to pick out the recyclables and place them in a designated area. The robotic picker needed to meet predefined performance requirements, and in addition, the solution had to be durable, recyclable/sustainable, affordable, portable and re-programmable. Several options were considered to design robotic pickers that were fit for purpose ranging from, a custom solution where the robotic picker uses a suction and release mechanism rather than grab and release, to the modification of an off-the-shelf robot arm/picker to the combination of hard robot and soft robot.

In conjunction to this project, Interface also connected Danu Robotics into EPCC at the University of Edinburgh to develop software for identification and classification of objects and to define suitable hardware, including sensors and cameras, for the robotic picker.

The software development phase required development of a machine learning algorithm that takes image data and sensor data to differentiate recyclables from the general waste. The company had to build up a waste image database to help the system identify contaminants, the collection of the image data was supported by Glasgow City Council. Each item in this visual database was then labelled by a specialist data processing company and the updated database used to ‘train’ the machine learning algorithm to identify what can and cannot be recycled.

With initial system training complete, the software required further development to direct the robotic sorting system to remove contaminants from a moving conveyor belt as efficiently and effectively as possible. Working with EPCC’s Cirrus supercomputer resources, accelerated the development of the project, with two months of lab tests to integrate the software with the robotic hardware, followed by a three-month trial of the prototype system at Glasgow City Council’s recycling centre.

The initial collaboration with EPCC was funded by a SFC Innovation Voucher, then EU Horizon 2020 (H2020) funding which in turn helped leverage £70K in a SMART Scotland grant. They have recently secured SFC Advanced Innovation Voucher funding to continue development work with EPCC.

Other opportunities which Interface have been instrumental in assisting Danu Robotics with include:

• An MSc project for a design engineering student from Heriot Watt University interested in robotic design and kinematics to design a robotic arm that can sort waste items quickly and lift loads of up to 20kg while the entire arm assembly is moving at high speeds. An optimal design needed to consider the harsh dirty and dusty operating environment and the high speeds that the assembly needed to work in. The project provided an opportunity to produce an innovative and challenging piece of academic research, but also engagement in industrial research and product development.
• Another MSc opportunity with DMEM students at the University of Strathclyde involved the development of a control system for the waste sorting robot. Students interested in control systems, kinematics, and industrial design worked to identify a closed loop control system best suited for application in a heavy industrial robotic waste sorting system.
• A further project is underway with Design Engineering students at Heriot Watt University looking at the design and development of prototype of a new emergency stop system which needs to be designed to bring the mass to a stop in a safe manner. The robotic system uses a belt drive system driven by an industrial servo motor with no service break and currently relies on the frictional losses present to come to a stop in case of an emergency or loss of motor torque.

The Benefits

• In September 2023, Danu Robotics joined the prestigious Octopus Ventures Springboard programme and CEO Xiaoyan Ma gave a keynote at the Carbon13 conference.

On 31st August at the GRID at Heriot-Watt in Edinburgh an event is taking place to signpost some of the support available locally within Edinburgh to help businesses to unlock growth and success. Discover how the National Library of Scotland, Interface, Edinburgh College and Universities (University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh Napier University, Queen Margaret University and Heriot-Watt University) can help, from upskilling, to collaborative funding.

This event is a one-of-a-kind platform where businesses of all shapes and sizes can come together with representatives from renowned universities and stakeholders within the city. This event aims to showcase the valuable resources and expertise available in Edinburgh to businesses, enabling them to thrive in an ever-evolving market landscape.

During this event attendees will also be able to enjoy refreshments and a light breakfast, with ample time dedicated to networking.

Agenda

9.00 Registration & breakfast (tea, coffee, pastries)

9.30 Welcome (HWU) and (ECC)

9.42 Second presentation (National Library)

9.49 Third presentation (University Representative)

9.56 Fourth presentation (Edinburgh College)

10.03 Fifth presentation (Interface)

10.10 Closing Remarks

10.12 Networking

10.30 Close

Louise Arnold of our Business Engagement Team will be presenting on the day on how Interface can help businesses innovate and collaborate.

Background

Family-owned Arbikie Distilling Ltd is aiming to be one of the world’s most sustainable distillers.

The Arbikie Highland Estate distillery is a genuine field-to-bottle operation – the ingredients for all their spirits are planted, sown, grown and harvested on the farm within a stone’s throw of the distillery. Records show distilling on this site dating back to 1794 – it is the field-to-bottle culture used by these ancient distillers that inspired Arbikie’s distilling ethos. Premium spirits can only come from the highest quality ingredients and drawing from decades of farming experience, they grow all the raw materials to make their award-winning range of whisky, vodka and gin.

The Arbikie Highland Estate has always been farmed with absolute respect for the land. The addition of a distillery has not changed their commitment to minimising any environmental impact.

The soon-to-be hydrogen-powered distillery at their Angus farm has always had a focus on sustainability. Production began in 2014 with the goal to add value to the potatoes which were deemed to be too ‘wonky’ for the farm’s bigger customers. Tattie Bogle Potato Vodka was born and from there they have gone on to release a range of award-winning gins, vodka and whisky including their climate positive Nàdar spirits made from peas.

The Challenge

The Scotch Whisky Association has set an ambitious target for the Scotch Whisky industry to reach carbon neutrality by 2040.  In order for the industry to reach this goal it is vital that sustainability is improved across the supply chain, including both agricultural practices and malting.

To reach these sustainability goals Arbikie needed to look beyond the distilleries four walls and consider both upstream and downstream emission sources. A major contributor to the carbon footprint of barley-based alcoholic beverages such as Scotch Whisky is tied within agricultural practices (e.g., the use of nitrogen-based fertilisers) and in the processing of raw barley into malt. Conservation barley varieties have been introduced into the farm rotation as they are known to have the potential to reduce emissions, whilst utilising low input agricultural regimes. The challenge addressed here was to look further down the production chain and producing malt from these varieties in a more sustainable way.

The Solution

Funding through The Scottish Food & Drink Net Zero Challenge Fund, from Scotland Food and Drink, administered by Interface allowed the collaboration between Arbikie Distilling Ltd and Heriot-Watt University’s International Centre for Brewing and Distilling (ICBD), to take place.  

The project focused on characterising the behaviour of conservation barleys upon exposure to industry-typical malting regimes and sought to exploit some of the known resilience present in such barley to reduce water and energy input into malt production.  Within its scope, the project successfully identified conservation barley varieties that could be used to produce malt of favourable quality.  Further, the results indicated that malt quality was similar between the typical and low input regime, highlighting potential for reduced input malt production.

Bringing together Arbikie’s knowledge of agriculture with Heriot-Watt’s malting expertise has resulted in the inherent qualities of older barley varieties being applied to the malting process to successfully develop lower input regimes.

Benefits

• The project successfully identified conservation barley varieties that could be used to produce malt of favourable quality. In addition, the results indicated that malt quality was similar between the typical and low input regime, highlighting potential for reduced input malt production.
• Bringing together Arbikie’s knowledge of agriculture with Heriot-Watts malting expertise has resulted in the inherent qualities of older barley varieties being applied to the malting process to successfully develop lower input regimes.
• The project has allowed for continued development of expertise in conservation/heritage barley variety processing at HWU. This has led to a demonstrable benefit for teaching and research at Heriot-Watt University’s International Centre for Brewing and Distilling (ICBD).
• From a research perspective the work has allowed for development of additional research projects in the area that are anticipated to lead to publication of peer-reviewed journal articles. With regards to teaching, the project has contributed to on-going efforts to grow research-led teaching and is benefitting development of student laboratory skills through multiple undergraduate and postgraduate student thesis projects that continue to explore the theme.

The Scottish Food and Drink Net Zero Challenge Fund

This project benefitted from The Scottish Food & Drink Net Zero Challenge Fund, a key initiative of the Scottish Government’s Industry Recovery Plan, first launched by Scotland Food & Drink Partnership and Interface in October 2021, with the aim of encouraging businesses to take action on their environmental impacts through collaborative projects with Scottish universities in order to accelerate their journey to net zero. The fund supported 17 projects across a range of sustainability themes and companies.