About Health Research and Innovation

Intel’s Health Research and Innovation team is committed to delivering research-based innovation for healthcare. Informed by nearly a decade of ethnographic studies, we share a vision with healthcare leaders of using innovative technologies to transform healthcare, improve chronic disease management, and enhance wellness and independence. We develop new health technologies for individuals who are at home or on the go, and collaborate with healthcare professionals to enable seamless interaction and information exchange. We help to connect people and information in new ways that increase patient care and safety, reduce healthcare costs, and improve quality of life across the continuum of care.

Health Research and Innovation in Europe
The Health Research and Innovation team Europe (HRIe) based in Leixlip, Co Kildare, was initiated in 2006 and is a part of the Health Research and Innovation team (HRI) based in Oregon, USA. HRIe research is focused on understanding ageing in European culture and how technology can be used to help older people remain independent wherever they chose to live. With the global population of older people set to almost quadruple to over 2 billion within the next 50 years, it’s predicted that demographic ageing and its impact on inadequate healthcare systems will be one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century.

At Intel we believe that new technologies, designed with an explicit focus on the needs of older adults and their clinicians and care providers, can help to meet these challenges, easing the burden on strained health care systems and providing peace of mind and meaningful engagement for the ageing. The interdisciplinary HRIe team, comprising social scientists, hardware and software engineers and interaction design researchers, has been working on various projects in support of that goal.

Global Ageing Experience
This project provides a global, cross cultural understanding of the reality of ageing in countries undergoing marked demographic changes. Using ethnographic techniques such as open-ended interviews, observations and multi-day visits to households in seven European and one Asian country, thousands of images, stories and insights have been gathered illustrating what it really means to grow old from the perspective of the elderly themselves. This helps to understand the myriad social and cultural differences in people’s experiences of ageing and health and helps to identify strategic opportunities for appropriate technologies and services for the aged.

Rural Transport
There is growing recognition of the relationship between social engagement (of the type enabled by mobility and transportation initiatives) and physical and mental health.
This project, a collaboration with the Rural Transport Programme (RTP), explores the role transportation plays in people’s lives as they age, particularly in rural Ireland.

Community Supports for Ageing
This project builds upon a range of studies including the Global Ageing Experience. It provides information on the demographic profile of Europe's older people, a basic overview of the main welfare models that exist in the EU and detail on individual projects organised around the key contexts – home, community and national/policy.

TRIL Centre
The Technology Research for Independent Living (TRIL) Centre is an international research centre set up to define and profile the ageing process, in order to develop technologies to allow more successful ageing. Founded in 2007, it has succeeded in raising the agenda for ageing research both nationally and internationally. TRIL is a collaboration between Intel, GE Healthcare, University College Dublin, Trinity College Dublin and National University of Ireland, Galway. TRIL seeks to enable people to live independently at any age by advancing the understanding of behavioural markers of disease, and how technology can be applied to produce positive interventions

TRIL’s achievements to date include:

• setting up a good clinical practice (GCP) standard assessment clinic within St. James’s Hospital, Dublin

• generating a portfolio of technology prototypes charaterised in a clinical setting

• deployment of those technologies into over 250 homes

• a worldwide network of technology & academic collaborators

• a leading international academic-industry collaborative research centre in the ageing field

This has been achieved by utilising a multi-disciplinary team approach of clinical consultants, social scientists, engineers and industry. By using this model, TRIL has established a research infrastructure and a portfolio of core research programmes that all share the data from a patient cohort of over 600 older people.

TRIL is now positioned with a premier biopsychosocial dataset that is sure to improve our understanding of the ageing process and to develop meaningful solutions to enhance the lives of older people. Ageing is now a high priority on the agenda of developed countries, as a result developing technologies to assist in successful ageing worldwide has never been more urgent.

TRIL now seeks to utilise the knowledge generated by analysing outcomes from the first phase of TRIL’s activities to a wider audience, with a view to universal acceptance by the wellness and healthcare sectors.