Dino kingdom, robot award and GP satisfaction: News from the College

Before the week comes to a close, here’s a batch of fresh news and announcements from across Imperial.

It’s been a busy week of news at Imperial, and it’s not letting up quite yet. From an award-winning robot and acclaimed crisis management platform, to powering a dinosaur park and a study of patient satisfaction, here are some quick-read new announcements from across the College.

Dino Kingdom

A team of Imperial physicists have helped out a leading UK energy provider to hypothesize how much energy it would cost to power a dinosaur theme park.

Timed with the release of the latest dino blockbuster, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, the light-hearted piece of research found that E.ON could power the park for an eye watering £47,972,327.13 per year for 455,145,419 kWh of electricity.

Among the costs were only £815.58 annually for the electric, but £5,006,500 for the pterodactyl aviary.

Head on over to E.ON blog for the full read: Revealed: The mammoth amount of power a prehistoric park would need.

(Image and main story image credit: E.ON Energy UK)

Q-Bot’s top

Q-Bot, an Imperial-designed robot that helps insulate floors to save energy, has won a leading sustainable energy award, the Ashden award.

The robot, which can identify and avoid obstacles and hazards, is already helping insulate homes by working with landlords who need affordable, fast insulation. Q-bot’s work reduces heat loss through the floor by 80%, reduces draughts by 30%, and reduces fuel bills by approx. £150 per year.

The Imperial-rich team includes head of the Dyson School of Design Engineering, Professor Peter Childs, as well as Imperial alumni, staff and a placement student.

Q-bot has been supported by EIT Climate-KIC, based at the Grantham Institute – Climate Change and The Environment. 

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Praise for crisis management at Imperial

At the 2018 Business Continuity Awards last week, the College was highly commended in the Incident Management Award category.

The win recognised the College’s new crisis management SharePoint site, the result of a collaborative effort from staff which has incorporated lessons learned from previous incidents and exercises. The site aims to improve plan access and navigation, and create a central platform for aligning business continuity plans.

Alastair Lee, Head of Business Continuity said: “This is a fantastic achievement and the result of working together to build on our crisis management capability. I am extremely grateful to everyone who has contributed.”

Innovative postdocs

The first cohort of postdocs to complete Imperial’s Techcelerate programme have achieved some amazing things by stepping out of their labs for three months to pursue their business ideas. They share their experiences in a series of case studies published today.

Mr Tino Millar, Department of Mechanical Engineering, has developed novel technology for tracking and analysing sports performance.

He said: “Techcelerate has been a really good experience... Before I joined the programme, this was just a project but now I’ve incorporated a business... I am part of a network of other start-ups. Starting a company is very tough so that community is really important.”

Healthy relationships

To combat low satisfaction with GP services, the government has provided £175 million and implemented new policies, but how successful has this been? Dr Thomas Cowling and colleagues at Imperial and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine looked at data from a survey of 2.9 million patients from over 8000 practices in the UK from 2011 to 2014.

They found that people were most satisfied when they had good interpersonal relationship with their GP. Ease of making appointments and opening hours were less important.

The researchers also suggest that while new technologies, such as video consultations might improve access, they may also reduce the quality of important GP-patient interactions.

Read the full paper: Importance of accessibility and opening hours to overall patient experience of general practice: analysis of repeated cross-sectional data from a national patient survey

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