This fellowship will bring together a variety of people from different walks of life, including academics, industry, civil societies, policy makers and members of the public, in order to create new ways of developing and managing technological innovations. There is often a tension between the economic needs for increasing technological innovation and the ways in which these innovations may be developed responsibly - that is in a manner that is societally acceptable and desirable. We will develop an approach that aims to anticipate not only the positive outcomes but also the potentially negative consequences of technological innovations for society. We will draw on this and an understanding of people's lived rights and obligations to provide creative resources and methods for designers to develop responsible and accountable new technologies. Responsible Innovation lies at the heart of technologies in the Digital economy that aim to promote trust, identity, privacy and security. Although it has been drawn on in other scientific domains, as yet we have no complete example of how responsible innovation can be successfully applied in the DE sector. The fellowship will consider a motivating example to develop responsible innovation in action. We will look into one particular domain of technology and develop an agile process which will take account of the views of a wide range of people in a fast-changing context, in order to have some influence over the trajectory of an innovation. We will focus on the domain of social robots, those which interact with people and make decisions about what to do on their own accord. Because they make their own decisions in order to perform actions, we need to be able to recover what they did and why they did it, when things seem to go wrong. We will develop an ethical black box (EBB) through which the social robot will be able to explain its behaviour in simple and understandable ways. The development of the EBB will be an example of responsible innovation. We will test this out in particular accident investigations as a social process and we will do this in 3 different study domains. In the final stages of the fellowship, we will show the outcomes of the technological development and the investigations through a variety of means, including through the web and a final public showcase event. This will be to a variety of people including the general public, policy makers, and developers.

There are over 10.8 million disabled people living in the UK today. Nearly 6.5 million have mobility impairments. These numbers are growing as the median population age increases and age-related mobility issues due to musculoskeletal and neurological conditions such as arthritis and stroke, become more prevalent. Rehabilitation helps people improve and maintain their abilities in everyday life, but currently patient outcomes are hampered in two ways: Firstly, there is a lack of easy to use dynamic tools to help therapists to accurately analyse their patients' gait and mobility performance and devise the most effective personalised training and rehabilitation programmes. Secondly, as more and more rehabilitation occurs at home and requires patients to practice in the absence of a therapist, better ways to support in-home mobility and training are needed, to enable patients to achieve their potential in everyday mobility tasks. The FREEHAB Healthcare Impact Partnership will develop soft wearable rehabilitative devices to directly address these needs. FREEHAB will build on discoveries from our previous EPSRC Right Trousers project in which we discovered new soft materials that can be used like artificial muscles. These include 3D printable electroactive gel materials and soft, but strong, pneumatic chains that change they shape when inflated and can exert considerable forces. These materials will be used to develop devices to help people to walk, stand and to move from sitting to standing. Together with integrated sensing technology we will make devices that physiotherapists can use to accurately pinpoint limitations in their patients' movements, thus enabling them to plan personalised training programmes. We will also make simpler devices that the patient can use to enhance their mobility activities and exercises with confidence when a therapist is not with them. To do this we will work in partnership with physiotherapists in NHS services and in private practice, with people who have personally experienced physiotherapy for their mobility problems, and with business partners who are experienced in bringing rehabilitation and assistive technology devices through from concept to market. We will initially determine what patient and clinical considerations we need to take into account to design and develop the devices. We will continually consult with partners for their ideas and opinions as the devices are developed. We will plan how FREEHAB technologies will progress from research and development through translation into clinical trials, and to bring the devices into the supply chain after the project is over. This will be undertaken with advice from our clinical and business partners and with regard to regulation of devices for use in the NHS and intellectual property for commercialisation. When we have designed and manufactured our prototype devices we will test them to determine how physiotherapists find them useful for assessment and how patients find them comfortable and useful for carrying out their physiotherapy training and rehabilitation. We will collect their views alongside formal measurements of patients' performance when they are wearing the devices compared to their performance when using a conventional orthotic brace. We will ensure we have the right regulatory and ethical approval for this early proof of concept testing. The results of our evaluations will help us to prepare for the next stages in product development and clinical testing needed to bring the devices into use in the NHS.