RIU is a research group founded as a response to urgent, unmet clinical needs within ULHG. Health care staff regularly require custom solutions in response to the complexity of delivering patient care. RIU leverages cutting edge 3D printing technologies to rapidly develop and iterate innovations. The clinical team contribute ideas and critique the design iterations as they evolve, fostering an ‘ecosystem of innovation’ within the group.
What we do
The RIU team engages with clinical stakeholders across the hospital group, from the community through critical care settings, to help identify needs for healthcare innovations to help improve patient care. The team then helps to explore and develop solutions, and for solutions that are viable, progresses these to realisation.
Short – Term Collaboration
The group have experience solving challenging clinical problems by the bedside utilising 3D printing in as little as 24 hours. The RIU Lab facilitates these urgent projects that have a direct benefit to patient’s quality of life. Examples can be seen on our Case Reports page.
Long – Term Collaboration
Clinical Immersion – where the researchers immerse themselves in a specific area/specialty of the hospital to identify potential unmet clinical needs – involves close partnership with the clinical team, whereby the researchers are invited to assume a “fly on the wall” approach. The observations made by RIU researchers are filtered by healthcare staff to distil down into high-quality unmet needs. These needs then form the basis for designing solutions that have the potential to become larger, funded research projects.
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- School of Architecture and Product Design UL
