Professor Malcolm MacLachlan:

I thank Deputy Ellis for the questions. I will start with the assessment and the effects of Covid. I used the phrase that there was a "digital bounce". We all became much more literate and of course the smartphone is probably the best assistive technology that any of us have. Many of us do not think of it as assistive technology. Many more people also got online during Covid. I am aware that some people in Ireland were able to access services during Covid who, ironically, were not able to access services pre-Covid because the virtual access allowed them to connect in ways that they could not physically connect. There was a broader reach sometimes but one must be careful with that. One should not suggest that those sorts of services should replace anything but rather they should augment things.

One of the interesting things from an organisational perspective was that often one might have found that, for instance, the unions or the professions would have objected to some of the things that were necessary to happen during Covid-19 so that people could get services. Sometimes that way of providing services has been shown to be just as effective as face-to-face services. It is a matter of working out what is appropriate to the person and his or her circumstances and so on. Developing national guidance around that type of idea is important as well.

In terms of the centre of excellence idea, some of the members might be familiar with a book called Exponentialby Azeem Azhar who has an amazing graph of the exponential increase of technology going up while the way in which the system deals with technology is basically flatlining. In other words, the way in which we are set up to exploit the technolgies has not changed but the sorts of technologies becoming available have changed dramatically. At the moment, there are a lot of great things going on in rather disparate patches here and there, and a centre of excellence would not necessarily be one physical location but it would be the idea of bringing together a lot of those activities, including industry, in the European project. I mentioned we have 36 partners, half of whom are SMEs, and there are a few large corporations. That is across Europe, but conceptually one could have something similar within Ireland where we could have a think-tank bringing all those people together and aligning with things like the medical devices directive, which we have not really grappled with in Ireland and the implications it will have both for industry and research, and the potential for people who want to develop technologies and use them through what people call the maker movement, where a person with a disability works with an engineer to develop something for him or her. The extent to which that would be permissible now that the directive is supposed to be implemented is not really clear. There are some very important things in terms of direct service provision that could be thought through in that context.

My colleagues have mentioned dementia, but looking at the mental health side, about 50% of people who have some form of dementia experience some mental health problems, usually depression. There are something like 10,000 different apps for mental health. Some are fantastic, some are complete nonsense and some are probably quite dangerous. Again, we need some sort of framework around that. Many of these apps are not designed for people who have accessibility problems, so we need to give guidance and advice and, indeed, encourage accessibility. Globally, there are enormous markets for Irish industry to look at promoting the idea of universal design in assistive technologies in order that a whole range of people can use them.