HERON: HealthTech for Respiratory unmet needs

Clinicians and patients will sit down together to decide which everyday respiratory health problems most urgently need a new gadget or device to solve them. The HERON project addresses a persistent gap: medical technology is often developed by engineers and companies without direct input from the people who will use it—doctors and patients. As a result, some devices solve problems nobody actually has, while real needs go unmet. This project systematically collects and prioritises those unmet needs for respiratory care, from asthma and COPD to cystic fibrosis and lung cancer. If successful, HERON will produce a ranked, publicly available list of technology needs that device developers, startups, and the NHS can act on. This could steer innovation toward practical tools that improve diagnosis, monitoring, or treatment delivery—things like better inhalers, home sensors, or non-invasive ventilators. The project itself does not build any new devices; it creates a roadmap for others to build them. The impact is indirect but structural: smarter allocation of research and development funding, and fewer wasted resources on technologies that miss the mark.