WMG’s Associate Professor Mark Elliott will be working alongside health tech experts at EQL, in a two year part-time secondment, focusing on the impact of digital health technology.

Dr Elliott was awarded funding through the UKRI Innovation Scholars Secondment: Biomedical Science scheme which aims to intensify knowledge exchange between industry and academia.

Dr Elliott explained: “I’m looking forward to working closely with the team at EQL. My previous research has always been on the academic side so this will give me a real insight into a fast-growing health-tech company and how they operate.

“The aim of the secondment is to support EQL in evaluating and validating their platforms using rigorous research methods, whilst also gaining knowledge of the state-of-the-art technologies that EQL use to support people with their musculoskeletal health; it’s a really exciting opportunity.”

Dr Elliott is based at the Institute of Digital Healthcare at WMG, University of Warwick with his core research focusing on human movement analytics, using signal processing and data science approaches to monitor, measure and model movement in a range of different contexts. He is particularly interested in the self-management of physiotherapy, highlighting it as one of the big challenges in healthcare at the moment.

His role on the secondment is to undertake research into how digital applications of technology can support people to self-manage their musculoskeletal health. The focus will be on implementing remote management and digital health platforms that could incorporate a number of technologies such as chat bots. He will initially work in the R&D team to investigate methods to collect clinical information through smartphone applications as well as exploring other novel uses of consumer grade technology.

He added: “On the research side it’s really useful to understand how people can use digital platforms — how they engage with them and for how long, whether they find it useful and whether it improves the long-term outcomes of patients.”

Find out more about at the Institute of Digital Healthcare here.