Research and innovation: Youwell as a partner in SFIs and research projects

Youwell is both a platform and a partner for researchers. Here are two examples from the past six months. Youwell is also a partner in ForHelse and UngMeistring.

ICoN: preventing Parkinson's disease and dementia

The Innovation Center for Neuroresilience (ICoN) has been awarded status as a Centre for Research-based Innovation (SFI), and Youwell is a partner. ICoN will help shift the focus from treatment to prevention of neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's disease and dementia, through close collaboration between research, the health service and technology.

For Youwell, this is about connecting digital treatment with leading research, contributing to early intervention and better patient pathways, and developing solutions in collaboration across disciplines. As an SFI, ICoN brings together partners from research and industry, and the centre has now opened its own channels for news, research results and events.

Externship with UiB Ferd

We are further developing the platform to help researchers and clinicians create even better digital treatment programmes. When UiB Ferd, the career centre for early-stage researchers, gave us the opportunity to host Hasan Arsın and Haydee Artaza on an externship, we had no doubt.

They have contributed concrete ideas for how we can build features and tools for more personalised treatment, and we have already prototyped a solution for personalised choice of contraception.

For us, this has been a reminder of how much value lies in closer collaboration between academia and industry. Perhaps those of us in industry can get better at using researchers' expertise in commercial product development too.