As lockdown measures are eased across the UK, thoughts are beginning to turn to recovery – rebuilding the economy, reconnecting with loved ones (albeit at a distance), and restoring the nation’s physical and mental health. “The vast majority of people won’t have had an acute bout of Covid-19 or a hospital stay,” Prof Robert Copeland, director of the Advanced Wellbeing Research Centre (AWRC) at Sheffield Hallam University, says. “But they will have experienced significant periods of being sedentary … [and that] affects your immune system, it affects your inflammatory response in your muscles and organs. Particularly for people with long-term conditions who are not active and haven’t necessarily been accessing support services in the community or through their health and care providers, I think we’re going to see a significant challenge post-lockdown.”
A sharp rise in musculoskeletal complaints, particularly new neck, shoulder and back pain, has been reported by respondents of an Institute for Employment Studies survey, many of whom also say they’re eating less healthily, drinking more alcohol, and exercising less. Pre-Covid-19, government figures estimated that physical inactivity is responsible for one in six UK deaths (equal to smoking), and costs the UK £7.4bn annually. Researchers at Sheffield Hallam University have been working for more than a decade to develop innovations and programmes that encourage people to move more.
In January 2020, that work found a new home at the AWRC, a world-leading research centre based at the Sheffield Olympic Legacy Park. Expertise from across the university, covering everything from robotics, software design and engineering, to health, psychology, sports science, and the arts, feeds into three research themes developing practical solutions to one of the most pressing issues facing society today. The Healthy and Active 100 research theme explores how to support people into 100 years of healthy and active life; living well with chronic disease explores how physical activity can be used as therapy; and the third theme explores the development and application of new technologies to promote independent lives.
Amid the Covid-19 pandemic, AWRC researchers released an Active at Home booklet, in partnership with the National Centre for Sport and Exercise Medicine, Sheffield’s Move More programme, Age UK, Sport England and Public Health England, to help older people and those without digital access, stay active throughout lockdown. And although much of the AWRC’s face-to-face work has had to stop, other ongoing projects include research into the impact of parkrun on participants’ health and happiness; assessing how exercise can support the recovery of those with neurological conditions such as MS and Parkinson’s disease; and investigating the use of robotics, artificial intelligence and electronics in caring for children with specialist health needs.
The team also recently worked with researchers at the University of Sydney on its Get Australia Active project, and there are plans to support ongoing work with recovering Covid-19 patients and those whose health has been adversely impacted by lockdown via a specialist research and innovation unit for post Covid-19 rehabilitation (RICOVR). “There’s a huge effort already going on in health and social care services around rehabilitation [after Covid-19],” Copeland says.
“There is often a danger I think if academics come charging in [thinking they] have the answer and solution without the insight into what the realities are like on the ground. So our intention with RICOVR is to provide research and innovation to support the existing teams across health and care and help them understand what’s working, and what is not, as opposed to setting up new programmes in isolation.”
That collaborative approach is central to the work of the AWRC, with collaborations ranging from the Sheffield Children’s Hospital Charity, Westfield Health, Team GB and the NHS, to IBM, GoFit, and Canon Medical Systems. The centre is also providing support to startups working in wellbeing through a new accelerator funded by Research England. Participants receive up to £20,000 of funding, access to specialist facilities such as 3D movement analysis and morphology scanning labs, as well as input from world-renowned experts.
Dr Chris Low, associate dean in the College of Health, Wellbeing and Life Sciences at Sheffield Hallam University, says although the programme had to start remotely in April, it’s already proving popular. “We’ve had applications from across the UK as well as international interest from Norway, the US, Kenya, all over the place,” he adds.
There’s capacity to support up to 24 startups over the next year, with the first five already working (albeit remotely) with the accelerator team. They include the Nottingham-based Footfalls & Heartbeats, which has patented a technique whereby sensors can be knitted directly into textiles; Selfit Medical Ltd from Israel, which has developed a robot therapist for people with brain and heart disorders; and Mynurva, a London startup specialising in online mental health therapy.”
Accelerators tend to focus on business advice, pitching, finance,” Low says about the scheme. “We’ve got all that, but the main focus is actually on innovation and development. It’s about generating prototypes, refining the product, validating it. We get visitors from the London investment community who say they’ve never seen anything like it.”
While there’s been a great deal of global interest in the AWRC, the team is also keen to have a positive impact on the economy and quality of life of the surrounding community, something Sheffield Hallam University as a whole has championed as a modern civic university. The research centre is situated in Attercliffe, one of the UK’s more economically disadvantaged areas, and it’s hoped that by inviting schools, businesses and community organisations to participate in projects, sit on a newly formed community panel, or use the facilities, the AWRC can become one of the neighbourhood assets that drives positive change. “I really want [it] to have porous walls and be a place where people can come and belong and work together,” Copeland says.
As well as involving local users, Dr Lisa Mooney, the university’s newly appointed pro-vice-chancellor for research and innovation, says she’s been impressed by the ability of the research centre to transcend borders between disciplines – something that can be challenging for higher education institutions. “I think that’s a real asset,” she adds. “It’s not just health disciplines, it could be business or psychology, it could be data analytics … [The teams consider] agendas around health, economy, culture society, but the difference is they always come back to the users, the application, and the ultimate benefit [of that research].”
Copeland agrees the AWRC’s work is multidisciplinary by design. He’s taken inspiration from a consensus statement by the International Olympic Committee in 2013, which imagined the potential for this sort of centre to design, study and innovate interventions to improve health. “They said: ‘We’ve tried for decades to tackle non-communicable chronic disease from single academic disciplines, and we’ve failed miserably to make an impact on a population level’,” he says. “And therefore what we have to do is bring together the different academic disciplines, but also the users of these interventions, business and industry, [in order] to think differently and creatively around the problem, and work collectively on co-produced solutions.
“What gets me really excited is the opportunity to create a wellbeing-driven economy,” he adds. “And the role we can play in supporting that longer term work.”
