Breathing Innovation into lung health, wellness and wealth. Through Collaboration and Innovation- Respiratory Innovation Wales (RIW) is aiming to be a world leading gateway providing a range of professional services to NHS, Academia, and Industry.

Respiratory disease covers a large, diverse range of mainly incurable conditions including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), asthma, bronchiectasis, cystic fibrosis, and lung cancer. Finding ways in preventing respiratory disease, managing, and treating it more effectively, could bring about substantial benefits to health outcomes and reduce economic burden.

We aim to:

• Enhance and develop respiratory products, services, and treatments.
• Seek real world insights through advanced data science and digital engineering.
• Expand our research and innovation activities.

Our specialist team, of practising clinicians, researchers and technical staff can provide a range of bespoke services tailored to your needs.

If you are:

• Looking to enhance your respiratory products, services, or treatments
• Seeking real world insights to benefit your innovations and developments
• Conducting research that requires collaboration with other organisations
• Needing support for implementing and delivering multi-site trials across Wales

Then RIW can help

Our approach ensures that our services are tailored to meet your specific needs. Examples of some of our current and most recent projects include:

• SMART Housing – building a more sustainable future – RIW are proposing a disruptive approach to defining SMART housing, as the lack of definition and a tendency for reliance on well-established technologies is causing lots of confusion and is being seen as a hinderance to its development.RIW believes that living smarter is living better, and this concept should be the core descriptor in the definition of the SMART housing. RIW in partnership with Welsh Institute of Digital Information (WIDI) are proposing an exercise to establish the scope of SMART housing within Wales and establish thematic work areas to enable better collaboration. Currently SMART housing is seen as a contributory factor in establishing a more sustainable future for housing in Wales but is undefined in how it contributes to strategic goals in housing and health and social care.
• Mobile Respiratory Unit – Respiratory Innovation Wales (RIW) in collaboration with Cwm Taf Morgannwg University Health Board, Hywel Da University Health Board, and Life Sciences Hub Wales, have brought together a mobile unit to address the shortfall within community services and provide increased access to respiratory diagnostics. The Mobile Unit offers an innovative, timely, equitable, and accessible service for patients closer to home, representing a major initiative for planned care recovery in Wales.
• Dedicated Portal for NHS and Academic 3D printing – A collaborative project between University College London IXN programme (UCL IXN), Respiratory Innovation Wales and Cwm Taf Morgannwg University Health Board in developing an online repository for 3D printable designs and product risk files to enable NHS hospitals to rapidly print suitable medical device parts and anatomical models.
• Voice pattern recognition and analysis to support care in chronic disease – Chronic disease can often alter breathing and speech patterns. Subtle changes in patients with raised physiological stress, exercise or speech might not at first be apparent. ARIA uses the power of artificial intelligence to aid detection of clinically relevant information that might previously have been undetected.

Through NextGen Living RIW aims to work with capital projects using innovation and modern methods of construction to embed compassionate and empathetic thinking by designing homes, workplaces and public spaces of the future supporting the health, wellness and wealth of building users by innovating in energy, construction, food and nutrition, senor technology, data and data analytics.

We believe that in RIW we have the opportunity to translate good ideas into products and approaches that will improve the respiratory health and well-being in Wales and beyond.

Interested in finding out more?

Get in touch with us and ask what services we can offer you.