Dr Ben Oldfrey Lecturer/Assistant Professor at UCL

Video 20/20 in our Inclusive Research Guidance for Early Career Researchers

Dr Ben Oldfrey is a lecturer with the Global Disability Innovation Hub at University College London in the UK, primarily working on the FCDO AT2030 programme, looking at models of AT provision for low resource settings globally.

His work is centred on the opportunities for local production systems and innovation to plug gaps in AT services, with distributed manufacture, repair services and sustainability strategies being key topics of interest.

He also conducts more fundamental work on soft material printing, building on his PhD which combined the development of hyper-elastic nanocomposites with deep learning algorithms to produce soft skin-like sensors for prosthetic and orthotic applications.

Funding information:

The TIDAL Network+ is a collaboration between UCL, Strathclyde, Salford and Loughborough Universities, led by Prof Cathy Holloway, Academic Director of Global Disability Innovation Hub and Professor at UCL. The research team includes Prof Laurence Kenney (Salford University), Prof Richard Bibb (Nottingham Trent University), Prof Mikko Koria (Loughborough University) and Dr Arjan Buis (Strathclyde University). We are funded from 1st September 2021 to 31st December 2024 by the EPSRC as a Healthcare Technologies New Challenges Network Plus (EP/W000717/1).

TIDAL stands for, ‘Transformative Innovation in the Delivery of Assisted Living Products and Services’. Our purpose is to improve the quality of Assistive Technologies (AT) and hence the lives of the people who use them, their families and carers.