Dr. Ian McCabe:

I am going to paraphrase my submission because the members do not need to hear me read it all out. I work in the HIVE laboratory. I am not a medical doctor; rather, I am a scientist, a physicist. I have been working in the school of medicine over the past year with Professor O'Keeffe, who is the principal investigator on this project. He is the consultant endocrinologist in the hospital and also a professor of medical device technology in the University of Galway. Therefore, he bridges the important gap between the HSE and research.

I am a native islander as well. I am from Clare Island and I have been working for the university from that island for the past eight years. I have field-tested much of the technology we are trying to put in place through the health project.

What we are doing is in large part driven by the adoption of broadband in our rural areas. While we have not seen the national broadband plan come out yet, the broadband technologies available have increased dramatically in the past five or six years, and we are able to use them for this type of research. We are doing the likes of virtual consultation, remote monitoring of patients, community-based health activity and nutrition strategies for individuals. We are also doing some more exotic things, such as using robots, which some members might have seen on RTÉ News a few months ago. We are also using drones to deliver medical supplies and trialling artificial intelligence to help with the scheduling of patients' appointments. We are also going to start a trial soon using remote telepresence to determine whether we can combat loneliness in the island population.

The important point that sets this project apart from others, on which I have worked, is that we have a really strong consortium of organisations involved in management, not least the so-called quadruple helix of industry, community, government and academia. The Home Health and Virtual Hospital projects are funded by Cisco and Science Foundation Ireland. We have very strong community engagement, which I will talk more about. With regard to government, we include Mayo County Council and individuals from the Department of Rural and Community Development in our monthly meetings. Where academia is concerned, there is a collaboration between the University of Galway and University College Dublin on the human nutrition side. Also, we are trying to be multidisciplinary internally. In this regard, we are not looking at the matter just from a doctor's point of view as we also have psychology, mathematics, education, nursing and epidemiology involved. Really, we are multidisciplinary, trying to get towards some sort of transdisciplinary approach in which we would eventually consider bringing in representation from the arts and try to treat the issue as a whole-of-society one.

The second point, which is probably the most important and the one I would really like to stress, is that we have been very careful to ensure the community has been listened to and engaged with very thoroughly from the start. Initially, this began through the community organisation Cliara Development Company. We conducted several round-table discussions on the island with islanders. We gave islanders the opportunity to say yea or nay on the entire project at the beginning and we have continued to stress communication and constant integration with the island. We have a person employed whose sole purpose is to be the bridge between the research project and the community. This has been very important and why there has been a great uptake in the community.

One thing that has been a very powerful tool for us, as researchers, is that we have very strong community engagement. We believe that the islands represent a great place to conduct this type of research because we have communities which are already engaged. The committee has heard from representatives of the islands who have discussed their community organisations and the level of engagement that they have and that continues through this. We have individuals who are keen for change and keen to adopt new technology as well. We would see the islands as the natural place to conduct this type of research, with the goal of rolling it out beyond these individual projects which have limited duration into something akin to a national strategy. Among the most important people we have engaged with have been the doctors and nurses on the islands who have been very supportive. I will hand over now to Dr. Lineen-Curtis who can tell the committee a bit more about what it is like to be a doctor serving an island.