The LEAP Digital Health Hub is a partnership of the South West's leading Universities, more than 20 supporting companies nationally, many NHS Trusts & Health Boards, 4 social care organisations, the region's Local Authorities, the West of England Academic Health Science Network (AHSN), the award-winning business incubator SETsquared and Health Data Research UK (HDRUK). The 50+ partners that shaped this bid ranged from the research director for a provider of residential care homes, to a chief clinical information officer working in an intensive care unit; from the founder of a femtech startup to the head of the healthcare analytics team for a multinational consulting firm. In workshops through June and July 2022 they told us that Digital Health is as much about design and user experience as health data analysis; it is motivated by patient benefit but must also consider viable business models for industry. All Hub partners will have access to dedicated physical office space in central Bristol alongside the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Digital Health and Care. There, they will train, network and research together across disciplines and sectors. They will engage with partners across the UK- and beyond. Recognising that UK breakthroughs in Digital Health may be equally (or more) impactful abroad, the Hub's new "Global Digital Health Network" links the Hub to Digital Health expertise from the US, China, India, Nigeria and Australia (sections B1.2, B5). The Hub's unique Skills and Knowledge Programme is designed to address the professional training needs of industry, health and social care providers and academia within the two Themes of Transforming Health & Care Beyond the Hospital and Optimising Disease Prediction, Diagnosis & Intervention. This is proposed to be the world's largest Digital Health taught programme. The Hub's Fellowship programme will comprise 5 different schemes to develop future leaders, within not only academia, industry and the health/care sector, but also within the community - as patients or informal carers. The Hub's Research programme focusses on pre-competitive research within the Hub's two thematic areas of Transforming Health and Care Beyond the Hospital and Optimising Disease Prediction, Diagnosis and Intervention. The Hub will add value by surfacing health priorities from its partner health and social care organisations, working with the West of England AHSN and also with Hub members such as Chief Nursing Information Officers, with charities, social care providers, patient and community groups.

Society is battling with an explosion of health conditions that need long-term management. These chronic conditions occur at all ages: UK children have some of the world's highest levels of both asthma and type 1 diabetes and, with a third of the UK's school children leaving primary education obese, there are huge concerns over type 2 diabetes at all ages; in any year, working age men and women in the UK have a 12% chance of a diagnosed mental health issue such as anxiety, depression and post-natal depression; conditions including dementia, Parkinson's disease and frailty are rapidly increasing in later years. Low-cost, connected, digital technologies are increasingly seen as vital to the understanding, prevention, diagnosis and management of these conditions for months and years in the community. These digital technologies, such as smartphone apps, wearables, blood sugar monitors - and a near future of Internet of Things (IoT) devices such as smart home systems (e.g. Echo), smart meters and connected appliances - offer an unprecedented opportunity to monitor a patient's condition within their community. With the data processed by artificial intelligence they will deliver decision support to health and care professionals; predict or detect a patient's symptoms worsening; support independent living; deliver behavioural and even pharmaceutical interventions; and allow the efficacy of treatments to be monitored. This cannot be business as usual for doctoral education since a digital health technology is likely to require a highly multidisciplinary understanding of technologies spanning software engineering, microelectronics, data communication, signal processing, machine learning and visualisation. Achieving actual patient benefit requires user-centred/driven design, a broad understanding of health and care, psychology, physiology, ethics, regulation, health economics and the design of clinical trials. To meet the challenge and seize the opportunity, the UK needs to nurture leadership that will span this hugely multidisciplinary space - combining technological depth with broad appreciation of the health landscape; empathy with the patient's needs with an eye to business models that underpin adoption; ambition to accelerate innovation with a principled commitment to ethics, inclusivity, regulation, data security and privacy. The opportunity and the challenge for this Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Digital Health and Care is to be bigger than the sum of its parts; to physically co-locate a cohort of students from Engineering & Computer Sciences and Health & Life Sciences; to bridge the disciplinary gaps, work with key external partners, foster better understandings and activate peer-to-peer learning within the cohort itself. Bristol is the perfect place to train future leaders at this disciplinary interface, building on £30M of digital health research at the University since 2013. Our proposed CDT will develop team-players with the skills to work effectively with experts from other disciplines, with patients and with the public. In a space where issues of trust, privacy, transparency, accountability and inclusion are absolutely fundamental, the CDT will not only embrace Responsible Innovation but influence and lead best practice nationally and internationally. The CDT will build on a variety of established relationships; with small and medium sized businesses, technology companies, big pharmaceutical companies, charities, universities, one of the UK's largest public science centres (WeTheCurious), Bristol City Council, and with the public. This CDT is therefore envisaged as a multidisciplinary community of students and academics that will create exciting research projects and will build networks of individuals across academia, industry and the NHS at all levels. It will sow the seeds of future collaborative research and of commercialisation activities.