MFT researcher awarded UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship

Dr Lukas Hughes-Noehrer, Lead for Computational Medicine at Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust (MFT), has been awarded a prestigious UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Future Leaders Fellowship. 

The fellowship will provide £2.4million of funding over four years to establish the Manchester Digital Health Living Lab, an ambitious programme exploring how wearable technologies can be used to improve patient care and outcomes.  

Wearable devices can monitor vital signs such as heart rate, activity and sleep, providing clinicians with valuable real-time data to support patient care. Through the fellowship, Dr Hughes-Noehrer will take research directly into patients’ homes, investigating how wearable technology can support people undergoing cancer care and whether continuous patient-generated data can help NHS teams deliver more personalised care. 

The Manchester Digital Health Living Lab will bring together patients, community organisations, clinicians, researchers, industry partners and local government to design and evaluate wearable-enabled care, with a strong focus on accessibility, trust, usability and digital inclusion. 

The programme will explore barriers to adopting wearable technologies and develop secure systems that connect wearable data to electronic health records. It will also explore how continuous streams of patient-generated data can be transformed into clinically meaningful real-time information to support care. 

The funding will further support a wearable-enabled clinical trial, working with approximately 800 patients undergoing lung and hepato-pancreato-biliary (liver, pancreas, gallbladder and bile duct) surgery, to trial adoption and evaluate the potential to improve health outcomes. 

Dr Hughes-Noehrer, who is also a Lecturer in Mobile and Wearable Health Technology in the Division of Informatics, Imaging and Data Sciences at The University of Manchester (UoM) said: “As someone who works at the intersection of healthcare and research, I see first-hand how health inequalities can affect who benefits from new models of care and emerging technologies. Wearables have huge potential to provide more personalised, proactive support, but only if everyone can access, use and trust them. By working directly with our communities in Manchester, I want to build a model for wearable-enabled care that is fair, safe and trusted, and that other places in the UK and beyond can follow.” 

The findings from the Manchester Digital Health Living Lab will help inform the future use of wearable technologies across healthcare and support the development of digitally enabled hospitals and care pathways in Greater Manchester and beyond. 

The Fellowship also aligns with Dr Lukas Hughes-Noehrer’s role as Co-Lead of the Greater Manchester Wearables and Remote Monitoring Innovation Cluster (GM-WIC).   

Led by MFT, in partnership with UoM, Manchester Metropolitan University and the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Manchester Health Determinants Research Collaboration, hosted by Manchester City Council, GM-WIC is bringing together public sector organisations, leading universities and global commercial partners in a ‘triple helix’ model. Together they are transforming how wearable and remote monitoring technologies are researched, developed and deployed.   

It will reduce the barriers currently experienced by companies and innovators looking to develop new wearable and remote monitoring technologies by bringing together the best minds across Greater Manchester, as well as the region’s long-established integrated health and care system, into one place, enabling a smoother process for technologies to be developed from concept to market. 

Dr Hughes-Noehrer’s work will support MFT’s strategic ambition to unlock the safe and effective use of wearable technologies at scale, supporting the delivery of the NHS 10 Year Health Plan through more preventative, personalised and digitally enabled models of care. By embedding remote monitoring and patient-generated health data into routine pathways, MFT is working to help shift care from hospital to community settings, enable earlier intervention, support patient self-management and reduce unwarranted variation in outcomes. 

The programme will also benefit from the recently signed partnership between the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) and MFT to establish the Manchester Sandbox, which speeds up evaluation of emerging digital health technologies in real-world settings. Through the collaboration with the Sandbox and wider regional partners, MFT will help generate evidence on the safety, effectiveness and implementation of wearable-enabled care, while creating clearer pathways for innovators to develop, validate and deploy technologies that can improve patient outcomes across the NHS.