Covid-19 Response Call
DDI COVID-19 Response & Recovery Small Grant Funding
DDI Funding: £243k
Timescale: Implemented by July 2020
Lead Hub: DDI Programme Management Office
Round One
Jessica Hafetz Mirman
School of Health in Social Science
CoronaReport – a citizen science approach for supporting vulnerable populations during the COVID-19 crisis
Awarded: £9,743
This project entailed a data-driven needs assessment utilising citizen-science methods with people and families living in or near poverty in communities in Edinburgh. The data from the needs assessment were used as inputs into a community organising initiative conducted in collaboration with Faith in Community to raise awareness of citizens’ specific needs, identify available resources and assets to meet these needs, and connect citizens with the resources and assets that they need and for traditional academic outputs such as peer-reviewed manuscripts. The corona report map is a living diary and can be browsed here.
Bonnie Auyeung and Louise Marryat
Edinburgh Futures Institute
School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences
Covid-19 in pregnancy
Awarded: £18,000
To combat the wide-spread transmission of COVID-19, many countries, including the United Kingdom, have imposed nationwide lockdowns. Little is known about how these public health safety measures affect pregnant mothers and their offspring. This study aimed to explore the impact of COVID-19 public health safety measures on births in Scotland.
Methods: Using routinely collected health data on pregnancy and birth in Scotland, this study compares all births (N = 11220) between March and May 2020 to births in the same period in 2018 (N = 12428) to investigate the potential negative effects of public health safety measures introduced in Scotland in spring 2020.
Results: Mothers giving birth during the pandemic tended to combine breastfeeding and formula-feeding rather than exclusively breastfeed or exclusively formula-feed, stayed in hospital for fewer days and more often had an epidural or a spinal anaesthetic compared to women giving birth in 2018.
Conclusion: Overall, results suggest little impact of public health safety measures on birth outcomes. Further research is needed to explore the longer-term impacts of being born in the pandemic on both maternal mental health and child development.
Gauthier Collas
University of Edinburgh Business School
COVIDCollect
Awarded: £4,662
The project aimed to reduce the impact of COVID-19 on the financial health of small businesses of the food industry in Edinburgh and the Lothian region by introducing a B2B platform for local food producers and restaurants.
The marketplace-model platform enables restaurants to source more easily and reliably from local food producers. The direct B2B channel of distribution will maintain the needed level of activity to recover from the crisis. Also, the marketplace model enables data generation and improves financial recovery thanks to better access to data. Indeed, it will give to the users different KPIs on sales - inventory management - sourcing trends. The goal is to enable efficient return to normal activity with better analytics, and better use of data.
Thanks to the support from DDI, we were able to accelerate the development of the platform and offer a free-to-use platform to effectively support our local community. We are about to launch soon, and we are looking forward to seeing positive outcomes in Edinburgh and the Lothian region
Ewelina Lacka
Edinburgh Futures Institute
University of Edinburgh Business School
Post- Covid-19 Edinburgh Tourism Recovery
Awarded: £9,221
This project assisted Edinburgh-based tourism businesses in their efforts to recover from the impact of COVID-19, the project derives data-driven insights into key visitor markets that intend to visit Edinburgh and Scotland post-COVID-19, and can afford the visit. Insights deriving from this project can be used for strategic decision-making and marketing communication activities. To ensure that as many businesses as possible can benefit from the insights this project obtained, a visualization tool was developed and is freely available online (www.tourism-insights-scotland.co.uk).
Alessandro Rosiello & Matjaz Vidmar
Edinburgh Futures Institute
University of Edinburgh Business School
Impact of Covid-19 on High-Growth Businesses in Edinburgh City Region and Beyond
Awarded: £4,654
This project had been designed to capture the impact of Covid-19 on SMEs in the Edinburgh City Region in comparison to Scotland and the rest of the UK. In our region we have a relatively high number of high-growth start–ups and early-stage businesses, and tracking the details of the challenges of Covid-19 crisis is vital for informing the local (and national) government, support agencies and managers to devise effective responses. Our study was split into two halves:
Working with big data, we have built a new dataset integrating information about high-growth start-up firms from Beauhurst and FAME databases as well as a prior study we were working on as part of a Productivity Insights Network grant. This adapted and enhanced our analysis of the impact of the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic and the resulting public health policies on SMEs, as outlined on our report Analysing Resilience in High Growth Firms at the Onset of Covid-19 Crisis.
In addition, we also explored the development of strategic agility amongst the high-growth SMEs within the key Data-Driven Innovation sectors, in particular Space in Satellite. This work was building on our past research in the sector within the city-region and across Scotland and looked in particular at how companies responded to the impact of Covid-19 and developed strategies to cope with it, as analysed in our paper Resilience of New Space Firms in the United Kingdom During the Early Stages of COVID-19 Crisis: The Case for Strategic Agility.
Overall, this project led to critical engagement with high-growth SMEs in key data-driven industries and shared learning through a webinar and extensive social media activity. The project also led to new research opportunities, including a research partnership with Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and East Asia (ERIA) on entrepreneurial and innovation emergence in South East Asia as part of post-Covid-19 regeneration and renewal.
Fiona Denison
Usher Institute
The University of Edinburgh Medical School
Data-driven evaluation of rapid national implementation of home blood pressure monitoring for shielded and high-risk pregnant women to reduce risk of Covid-19 by reducing hospital/face-to-face consultation
Awarded: £18,000
This project aims to assess whether rapid implementation of home blood pressure monitoring (HBPM) in pregnant women across Scotland reduces the number of face-to-face consultations for high-risk (Class 1 and 2, as defined by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists1) pregnant and postnatal women during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Paul Bessell, Lisa Boden, Mark Bronsvoort, Giles Innocent, Ian Handel, Stella Mazeri, Thibaud Porphyre
Easter Bush
Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies
Understanding the epidemiology of COVID-19 in Scotland to design and model lockdown exit strategies: A risk-based approach to policy prioritisation
Awarded: £18,000
The project aim is to draw on experiences and expertise from animal epidemics and risk governance to improve the understanding of the epidemiology of the Scottish epidemic to inform policy and decision making. This project we will:
- Communicate to stakeholders the pertinent findings form mathematical modelling research
- Map populations that are at increased risk of developing severe disease.
- Extend an initial dashboard to monitor and communicate the status of the outbreak.
- Collate available but fragmented surveillance data from local communities in Scotland to better measure asymptomatic infections.
- Repurpose emergency response mathematical modelling framework to explore a range of exit strategies for Scotland.
- Conduct survey of a geographically stratified sample of GP practices and from NHS-111 to collate data on mild cases within different social and demographic strata to improve understanding on the scale of spread and transmission in communities
Round Two
Michael Rovatsos
Bayes Centre
OpportunityMatch – a web-based tool to match opportunities and people
Awarded: £10,000
OpportunityMatch is a web-based tool to match experts with opportunities such as descriptions of research and innovation themes, funding programmes, and ideas for collaborative projects. The tool, which uses advanced AI algorithms trained on large datasets to perform similarity matches between arbitrary documents, enables opportunity-to-expert, expert-to-expert, and opportunity-to-opportunity matching, and provides customised alerts that automatically inform users about new matches to help connect people with common interests. Within the initial DDI project, the Bayes Centre in collaboration with EPCC successfully developed a working prototype that has been made available to all University staff, and is currently being adopted by the University’s business development community at Edinburgh Innovations and across the institution. We are currently exploring opportunities to expand its database to organisations beyond the University, and to identify further use cases where a smart social search engine could enable data-driven collaboration among people within and across organisations.
OpportunityMatch can be accessed at https://opportunitymatch.epcc.ed.ac.uk/ for users on the University’s VPN, and a brief introductory video is available from https://media.ed.ac.uk/media/OpportunityMatch+quick+intro/1_k11wkuxd. Please feel free to get in touch if you are interested in finding out how OpportunityMatch could be of value to your organisation, or to arrange a demo.
Morgan Currie
Edinburgh Futures Institute
Art in & after Lockdown: Recovering Edinburgh’s Cultural Spaces
Awarded: £13,657
Over the lockdown of summer 2020, the Culture & Communities Mapping Project collaborated with LeithLate to design the LeithLateVirtual Tours. The online tour map guides visitors through the vibrant tapestry of Leith’s creative community through beautiful high-res images of 11 murals, along with audio from LeithLate’s Tour Guide, Cameron Foster, and five artists describing the inspiration and installation of the artwork. The Virtual Tours also feature several Edinburgh art studios through self-guided video tours of twelve artists-in-residence. The project is based on open source code that can be replicated by other organisations interested in creating virtual tours of cultural space.
The Culture & Communities Mapping Project also began Edinburgh Flaneur, a website that lets users design customized guides to Edinburgh’s cultural spaces, street art, outdoor sculptures and historic cultural sites by bus or bike routes that span the city. Still a prototype, we are currently developing Edinburgh Flaneur so users can handily select routes, transit mode, and the types of cultural assets they want to encounter on their explorations around town.
Raffaella Calabrese
Edinburgh Futures Institute
University of Edinburgh Business School
Supporting people entitled to benefits to receive affordable loans
Awarded: £11,328
The main aims of this project are to support vulnerable people to identify the benefits that they are entitled to and to provide short term affordable lending to bridge the gap that will be repaid once the individuals receive their benefits. We propose to support lenders in making such decisions by providing a credit application check that takes into account the amount of benefits that the applicant is entitled to receive.
This was achieved by developing and applying the Inbest Benefits calculator that uses individuals’ banking data to calculate the income benefits users can claim and monitors their entitlement according to changes in their financial situation. We then used the data derived from the Benefits calculator as an input into existing credit scoring model to enable lenders to use this information to make short-term lending decisions for individuals who otherwise may fail to meet the standard credit risk models. We found that around 30% of Scotcash ‘s customers did not claim all the benefits they were entitled to. The project also received the support of Advice Direct Scotland, who provided expert feedback and insights based on their intimate knowledge of consumers' financial needs and problems.
Round Three
Suwen Chen and Professor Neil Pollock
Edinburgh Futures Institute
University of Edinburgh Business School
From surviving to thriving: How to tackle the challenges of a global pandemic and help to build a stronger local food system and prosperous community
Awarded: £8237.50
Founded in July 2011, Breadshare is a multi-award winning social enterprise (a hybrid form of traditional business and charity) whose mission is to make 'Real Bread for Everyone.' Covid-19 has posed significant challenges to Breadshare, including the loss of wholesale customers, reduction of physical visits to stores by retail customers, cancellations of face-to-face bread-making workshops, and so on. Against this background, this research project aims to investigate how to help Breadshare's survival by transforming its business model from purely offline to a hybrid of online and offline models. This has been based on the evaluation of the effectiveness of the new measures taken by Breadshare during Covid-19, analysis of customers' motivation and behaviour changes, and other data on industry development and government policies.
Our work to date has uncovered several interesting topics meriting further exploration. One of the most prominent findings is the often-underestimated role of serendipity. The importance of the entrepreneurial ecosystem has been verified by many scholars, and we have found that in the face of crisis, and compared with a planned ecosystem, accidental ecosystems (emerging from serendipitous encounters) could bring about more innovation. It can also hasten the pace of business model transformation through the reconfiguration of existing capabilities and leveraging new resources.
Also, being a social enterprise gives Breadshare more advantages than disadvantages. Although the range of choices may be limited as they have to prioritise social value over commercial profits to avoid mission drift (such as free delivery without a minimum order), Breadshare enjoys more resilience thanks to stronger internal alignment (committed staff, a higher level of trust), more support from various stakeholders (voluntary researchers, business partners), and a more closely bonded local community.
Galina Andreeva
Edinburgh Futures Institute
University of Edinburgh Business School
Lessons from the past crises for the Scottish hospitality sector and implications for COVID-19
Awarded: £10,438.71
Hospitality is currently one of the worst affected sectors of the economy due to travel restrictions and lockdown. There are concerns that many companies in this sector will not be able to recover. Nevertheless, there is no analysis at the company level, i.e. which companies suffered most, and which were able to recover quickly. This project intends to fill in this gap by developing data-driven quantitative models that will predict the insolvency/financial distress of tourism and hospitality companies caused by previous epidemics and generate forecast scenarios for recovery of Scottish hospitality sector following the current crisis.
This project will explore the last 20 years of financial statements for businesses within the international tourist & hospitality sector. The work is based on a collaboration with Wiserfunding – a London-based fintech that offers innovative solutions for SME risk assessment. To build its risk models, Wiserfunding uses extensive financial and non-financial information on the SMEs. The outputs will inform the policy recommendations by formulating the recipes for successful survival that will be targeted at business managers and regulators.
Rik Sarkar
Bayes Centre
School of Informatics
SIM-SPREAD: Data Driven Simulation and Modelling for Infection Spread Reduction and Cultural and Economic Reopening in Edinburgh.
Awarded: £17,379
This project has developed a probabilistic simulation framework that uses real mobility data from citizens to deduce the likely rate of spread of a disease. It studies the effect of different ambient restrictions such as restricted mobility, closure of some fraction of venues in the city, segregating citizens into random groups etc. The simulations can incorporate various virus-specific properties such as incubation period and asymptomatic carriers.
The project aims to enhance its analysis for greater statistical reliability, and will adapt the simulations to the specific scenario of Edinburgh and the types of datasets they have available. The projects partners from City of Edinburgh Council, Festivals Edinburgh and EventScotland will assist with insights and stakeholder priorities. Academics at Edinburgh Napier University are a specialist in Festival and Event Management, and will work closely with the team at the School of Informatics to further articulate partners insight needed to make critical decisions and to translate their discoveries into practical actions and recommendations for festivals, events and the City of Edinburgh Council’s Culture Department.
Andrea Wilson
Easter Bush
The Roslin Institute and Royal Dick School of Vetinary Sciences
Data-driven now-casting & fore-casting of health-care resource requirements associated with COVID-19 in Edinburgh and South-East Scotland
Awarded: £13,220.30
This project aims to generate evidence-based data-driven predictions of the effect of COVID-19 on the short- and long-term demands on primary health care and hospital resources in Edinburgh and South-East Scotland. This project will provide short term predictions (or ‘nowcasts’) of COVID-19 incidence and associated resource demands for the health service and hospitals in SE Scotland, and longer-term predictions (or ‘forecasts’) based on anticipated future COVID-19 exit strategies. These will help individual health care units and hospitals in SE Scotland to optimally distribute their available resources, and governments to optimally coordinate distribution of resources across these units. Optimal distribution of these resources will not only mitigate the devastating effects of COVID-19 on people’s health and survival, but also the indirect side-effects on other physical and mental illnesses for which effective prevention and treatment is impeded due to COVID-19.
Stewart Mercer and Stella Chan
Usher Institute
Edinburgh Medical School
Soothe and Care: Promoting compassion & positive mood in Edinburgh and South-East Scotland to fight mental health issues exacerbated by COVID-19 lock down
Awarded: £15,000
CogniHealth is a social tech startup based in Edinburgh that has created digital solutions to support families affected by dementia. This award has funded the development of a ‘soothing’ feature within CogniHealth’s existing app. The evidenced-based and personalised therapeutic activity for carers, who are struggling to cope with the current crisis, builds on the citizen science programme “Project Soothe”. With the technical feasibility of the Cognihealth app, a readymade, and in need, user base and the proven soothing qualities of the Project Soothe images the feature has delivered impact in the Edinburgh and South-East Scotland target area.
The new feature enables users to access and view soothing images. These images have been sourced from an existing database of 800 images that have been collected from the public and have previously been shown to help improve people’s mood. Users can personalise the images based on their preferences (e.g. themes, colours) and tell CongiHealth how they feel, and the impact the imagery has had to their mental health. It is an activity that can be done alone or together, sharing the experience either physically or virtually.
*At time of update users have viewed 5,178 images and liked 1,480 of the images, through the Soothing feature. There has been a total of 242 soothing sessions, out of which 81% of the mood of users by the end of the session was shared to be a positive emotion!
D K Arvind
Bayes Centre
School of Informatics
Monitoring COVID-19 Patients using the Respeck device at the Lothian Regional Infectious Diseases Unit (RIDU)
Awarded: £20,964
COVID-19 virus is the inflammation of lung tissues, and the exhibition of patterns of dyspnea – shortness of breath, and elevated respiratory rates above 30 breaths/minute. Current practice in hospital wards is for nurses to estimate manually and record the respiratory rate at hourly intervals with the exact period based on the prognosis of the attending physician. The hypothesis of this project is that continuous respiratory monitoring (minute-level frequency) may reveal underlying trends and patterns that are missed when only using the current manual snapshot measurements.
The Respeck device, developed in the Centre for Speckled Computing, School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, is worn as a plaster on the chest and transmits wirelessly continuous measures of the respiratory rate/flow to a mobile phone for onward transmission to the GoogleCloud for storage. The Respeck time-series data will be analysed using a selection of machine learning based methods for clearly identifiable patterns, with good sensitivity and specificity that could be used to predict deterioration in COVID-19 patients.
The patients in the isolation rooms at the Lothian Regional Infectious Diseases Unit (RIDU) in the Western General Hospital will each be attached with a Respeck on admission. The latest minute average of the respiratory rates for all the patients and their trends over the previous four to six hours can be viewed in a dashboard on a mobile device such as a tablet. At a glance the nurses can view and interrogate the status and trends in the respiratory rate for all the patients in the hospital ward.
David Weller
Usher Institute
School of Molecular, Genetic and Population Sciences
Covid19 and diagnostic/treatment pathways for lung and colorectal cancer in SE Scotland: Measuring the impact and facilitating recovery
Awarded: £21,993.00
This data-driven project will provide information on key aspects of cancer diagnostic services and treatment services in SE Scotland. It’s vital to know about how long it’s taking patients to have their cancers diagnosed and treated, the types of investigations they are getting, the cancer detection rates, and the emergency admission rates. This project will examine cohorts of patients diagnosed during and after the covid19 epidemic, and make comparisons with pre-covid data. It will undertake long-term follow-up to examine the impact on survival and mortality. These analyses will help in bringing cancer services out of the covid19 era, and lessening the negative impact on cancer outcomes for patients in SE Scotland.
Tina Harrison
Edinburgh Futures Institute
University of Edinburgh Business School
Covid-19 Support Finder
Awarded: £12,904
This project between the University of Edinburgh, Sopra Steria and a third distribution partner will launch a tool directly to the vulnerable citizen via their digital channels to help them navigate and find the most suitable financial and emotional support. The tool will take the user through a number of questions to determine their circumstances (e.g. loss of income, poor mental health, bereavement) and direct them to the golden source of information on appropriate support available (e.g. Government Hardship funds, grants for small businesses and the self-employed, NHS-endorsed helplines for emotional support). Finally it would ask users to provide feedback and explain if there isn’t any support available in their specific circumstances.
Dave Murray-Rust
Bayes Centre
Design Informatics
Acceptability of digital contact tracing applications
Awarded: £5,058
Digital contact tracing is a key feature of many exit strategies from lockdown – by rapidly sharing potential infections and tracing all of the people who have been in contact, it is hoped that many asymptomatic carriers will self-isolate and reduce the spread of the disease, reducing the replication rate significantly. This needs to be carried out rapidly, there is a clear desire for digital solutions in this space, which can rapidly carry out contact tracing at scale. However, there are issues around ethical use of data – privacy, transparency, data sharing, overreach, feature creep and so on.
The aim of this project is to find out: Which characteristics are important to end users’ choice of whether to i) install and ii) keep a digital contact tracing app and create design guidelines. What explanation is important to end users, and how is this best carried out? Also, how much difference a privacy preserving solution might make in terms of uptake. This project is interested in not just the app, but the manner in which it is deployed, with the intention to discover ways to improve deployment, and places where ethical behaviour supports this.