• Question: Do you have any patented inventions? How Many? What is your favourite?

    Asked by Stephen Hickingbotham to Andrew, Lizzie, Nick, Sonia on 14 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Elizabeth Kapasa

      Elizabeth Kapasa answered on 14 Jun 2015:

      I didn’t graduate long ago so I’m still relatively young. But I was involved in research that provided evidence for a patent for a treatment that will help with neuropathic pain – which is when nerves have been damaged sometimes they stay inflamed which leaves the patient in constant pain. Patents can take a while to process so I’m still waiting to here if it’s gotten approved yet! Pretty exciting though!

    • Photo: Andrew Phillips

      Andrew Phillips answered on 14 Jun 2015:

      I have a patent application on a device to help surgeons put the socket part of a hip replacement in the right place on the pelvis. New designs of implant are very sensitive to the position and orientations that they put in and so its important that surgeons put them in correctly – which they don’t always do! A lot of our work is using computational models and processes which are more difficult to patent, so that’s the only one so far!

    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 14 Jun 2015:

      No, since any ideas I have about improvements to products should belong to the whole community. Patents may be a good way of protecting intellectual ideas and potentially licensing fees for others to use your ideas. My own belief is to publish these ideas and make it available for the wider to the whole community free of charge.

      Tim Berners-Lee (a physicist who worked as a software engineer at CERN) if he had patented the internet protocols he would nave been very rich by now, but the internet would potentially only be available to academics or to companies who can afford to pay the licensing fees. Since he made it available to the world free of charge, its use has spread from the academic community to a world wide industry.

      Similarly to Linus Torvalds who made available the Linux kernels available to the software community under the GNU license model. Linux operating system is found as the operating system in your internet routers, internet of all things (i.e. smart TVs, smart fridges). No to mention its the operating system of choice for the Raspberry Pi computers found in schools. Last and not least the Android OS for 70-80% of all mobile phones and tablet computers run on the Linux kernel originally started by Linus Torvalds.

    • Photo: Nicholas Hitchins

      Nicholas Hitchins answered on 15 Jun 2015:

      Hi Stephen,
      I have two granted and a few more awaiting approval. All of them are not solely mine and have a number of named people on them. Most good design (especially in the medical field) takes a huge colabrtive effort and hence requires more than just a few people to perfect a good technology.
      I would say that I don’t have a favorite patent as I have generally been more excited by stuff I have worked on which has been much more about good design that weather it is patentable or not.

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