Silent aspiration is when food of fluid enters the airway during swallowing. The EPSRC are funding a workshop that will be held in Sheffield on 24 April 2018 with the aim of bringing together clinicians, academics and scientific engineers to think about development of new technologies for detection of silent aspiration. Current technologies for this are not accessible to patients with severe cognitive and/or physical difficulties and so we would like to explore alternatives which can in the future address this inequality.

D4D took the difficult-to-resolve  challenge of silent aspiration to an EPSRC Hive event in November 2017, where it was presented as a problem where collaborative working could help resolve existing issues that we have met in trying to address it. Funding was awarded by EPSRC to enable potential collaborators to meet.