• Question: How does what you want to do with the prize from this competition tie in with surgical engineering?

    Asked by 10jlam to Matthew on 8 Mar 2016.
    • Photo: Matthew Oldfield

      Matthew Oldfield answered on 8 Mar 2016:


      Hi! The rules for what we do with the prize are quite flexible. However, we are not able to just spend it on research. I would like to use the money to improve public engagement and awareness of engineering and how engineering is used in a medical context.

      The research team for which I work tries to teach the public about what we do at the Imperial Festival. Once a year this event allows the public to talk to us about our research. The Imperial Festival is aimed particularly at families. As we are a medical robotics laboratory we want to encourage families to find out about our work (both parents and children). One way to do this is to make our stand attractive to visitors with families. The second way is to show the visitors the kind of technical work we do in an open and recognisable way.

      By holding a competition using Lego robotics, we are able to introduce the concepts of robotics to families and talk to them about how they are used in our work. We will also be encouraging visitors to our stand where they can learn all about the different types of medical engineering that we do from the other exhibits.

      Although the robotic challenge for visitors has not been finalised, we will try to make it specific to something in the medical area. However, if that is not possible on the day – some of the visitors are very young indeed – we want to be able to talk about engineering more generally and robotics in particular.

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