Digital Health Coffee Time Briefing ☕

Your morning summary of digital health news, information and events to know about if you want to be “in the know”.

👇 News

🌱 Aisthesis Medical has raised $1.2 million (£89,000) in pre-seed funding, which it will use for the development and regulatory clearance of VIOSync SPI, an AI-powered clinical decision support platform that can predict in-hospital sepsis development within the next 48 hours. The tool uses multimodal patient data to create a digital twin of the patient’s evolving physiology.

✂️ Lord Hague of Richmond, chancellor of the University of Oxford, officially opened the £1.2bn Oxford North flagship global innovation district in September 2025. The development caters to the whole science, technology and AI ecosystem, including start ups, spin outs and global giants, with flexible lab and office space.

🗨️ Pocketalk has announced a partnership with Syndico, making it Pocketalk’s first-ever, authorised UK distributor. Pocketalk offers a suite of handheld device, app and administrative software solutions offer alternatives to outsourced translation and interpretation services.

💷 Heriot-Watt University has received more than £475,000 in funding for its skin sensing technology that could transform eczema and psoriasis treatment. The TissueMetrics solution measures material changes in each layer of skin using small vibrations on the surface. It received £275,000 from Scottish Enterprise and just over £200,000 from the Medical Research Council’s Gap Fund to advance clinical testing.

🧠 A 30-day project is assessing whether structured cognitive training can improve focus, working memory and daily functioning in adults with ADHD. The neuroscience-informed ADHD brain-training app Propel is being evaluated by a team led by Dr Dinesh Kannan, consultant psychiatrist and clinical lead for psychiatry at Medacs Healthcare.

❓Did you know?

The Mind Health Report, published by AXA Global Healthcare on 30 September 2025, found that young adult expats are four times more likely to turn to AI support compared to their older counterparts.

The Ipsos survey was carried out across 16 countries with more than 1,400 expat participants aged between 18 and 75. The findings highlight how age, cultural context and digital access are shaping new approaches to wellbeing worldwide.

Over half (51%) of younger adult expats believe that social media and digital devices are the prominent factor that negatively impacts their mental health.

Despite this, the age group were more likely to use AI to help – with 66% saying they would use, or are already using an AI virtual therapist for mental health support.

In addition, 40% of younger expats would turn to social media for mental health information, compared to 14% of older expats.

Xavier Lestrade, chief executive of AXA Health International, said: “The findings reveal a clear generational divide in how expats experience and manage their mental wellbeing.

“Younger adults are far more open in acknowledging challenges and seeking support, while older generations often report fewer issues and tend to rely on more traditional pathways.

“Both approaches have their strengths – whether it’s the resilience and perspective of older adults, or the proactive attitude of younger people towards managing their wellbeing.”

📖 What we’re reading

Drawing on the authors’ two decades of global health research and design practice, Real Lived Experience: A Radical New Design Philosophy for Health and Care by Chris Lawer and Nicki Sutton at Umio, explores the concept of health innovation with real lived experience.

It explores how representational thinking and models embedded in ways of perceiving health and illness can limit our capacities to perceive the real experience of conditions.

The authors argue that without radically changing how we perceive and engage with real experience, no amount of investment or reform will shift the conditions of health.

“Designers, product teams, AI developers, and policymakers build from ‘needs, ‘pain points’, and ‘personas’ derived from limited abstractions: clinical outputs, usage data, and journey maps.

“But they miss what happens in the complex in-between, such as in the space of grief before diagnosis, in the rupture between post-op discharge and emotional recovery, or in the unmeasurable struggle of making meaning when the system offers none.

“It is in these dimensions of real lived experience where innovation fails. Not because it isn’t advanced enough but because it lacks attunement to the actual, concrete realities of people’s lives,” the book says.

🚨Upcoming events

29 October 2025, ICC Birmingham – Shared Care Record Summit