This work was presented in 2019 at the European Advancement of
Assistive Technology Conference in Bologna Italy (Global Challenges in
Assistive Technology).
This conference provided fantastic opportunities to connect with
other researchers and digital innovators working in this field. Following a
conversation with a Dutch occupational therapist attending our seminar
expanded our ViVA collaboration and networks further.
We invited Dutch occupational therapy students to engage with our
project team and use our technology in their research projects.
In 2019, we built on this work further. We secured £50,000 of fundin
for a third project. The aim of this project was to pilot and evaluate the u
of this technology in four health and social care settings.
Settings would include speech and language therapy, occupational
therapy, physiotherapy, dietetics and a spinal injuries unit. The aim of th
project is to build evidence to inform a future bid to scale up this projec
and develop the evidence base for using digital technology to conduct
home assessments and consultations.
Patient and public engagement in all three projects has been critical
to our success. There is a perception that digital appointments are mor
efficient, could save money and importantly reduce the number of times
people need to travel to hospital (Read et al 2020).
We have found that ViVA was felt to have potential to be patient cen
by involving patients in discharge planning where they might not have b
able to participate in an access visit. For example, with ViVA they can b
observe the visit from the bedside in real time.
Recent adjustments to the technology have explored the possibility
of having more than one person on the call at once, which opens up th
opportunity to do a call with multiple professionals, such as an occupat
therapist at the hospital and a local authority occupational therapist, as
as the trusted operator in the home.
During the projects we have also offered opportunities for clinical
occupational therapists to have research experience by offering
secondments, which supports our research capacity building strategy.
We have found that exposure to digital research has motivated
occupational therapists to seek involvement in other research projects.
have developed our networks in digital research and raised the profile o
occupational therapy in this field.