We are delighted to have won 2 awards at The Engineer’s prestigious Collaborate To Innovate (C2I) Awards for our ongoing work on the Elevex project (previously known as the SMART Suit) with Duchenne UK and SMA UK. Elevex is a first of its kind smart exoskeleton suit aiming to help young people living with progressive neuromuscular diseases to use their arms and upper body.
The C2I awards celebrate the UK’s depth of engineering and design talent and the role that engineers and designers are playing in addressing some of the biggest challenges we face. The Elevex project won the Healthcare & Medical category, as well as the ‘Grand Prix’ award for the winning project across all categories.
The 2 awards for Elevex recognise the collaborative input of the amazing children and young people and their families who have guided the project with their invaluable lived-experience insights and critical feedback on a series of prototypes tested for the first time with young people living with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD) and Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA).
The C2I competition was judged by some of the leading figures in UK engineering and was supported by organisations including Babcock International Group, Science and Technology Facilities Council, EPSRC, Engineering UK, Megger, Hays Recruitment, Igus, and Ejot. Winners were announced at a special ceremony in London on Thursday 29th February 2024.
A first of its kind medical device development for two progressive neuromuscular conditions with distinct upper limb profiles and changing phenotypes, and planning commercialisation and procurement in a niche atypical market, is aggressively complex and inherently challenging. And demands a collaborative, cross-sector and interdisciplinary approach from the outset.
But beyond that, projects in this space could only be driven by the uncompromising mandate and the urgency of unmet need that patient-led organisations like Duchenne UK and Spinal Muscular Atrophy UK represent – advocating for important parts of our society currently disserved by innovative design and technology that is readily available to the rest of us within the wider consumer market.
As a design lab focused on improving health, mobility and equity for children and young people, we are acutely aware that while we focus our attempts on our immediate contexts, there are children and young people in multiple war-inflicted areas in the world, killed, malnourished to death, disabled and traumatised for life.
The right to life and equal childhood opportunities belongs to every child. The struggle in both our immediate and extended contexts continues. And one progress could not be truly celebrated without the other.
The Inclusionaries Lab 