OVERVIEW

Our project has evolved from a single idea to a multidimensional project that extends the healthy lifespan through many routes. The influence of human practices has formed an integral part of our project and has greatly changed not only the design of our therapies, but the team’s perception and understanding of the problem. We understand that the consideration of these human practices is crucial to build safe and sustainable therapies that meet the needs of the ageing population. We truly believe that every person we have interacted with within our human practices has resulted in either changing the way the team thinks about our project, to an addition of a new biobrick or an improvement to the design of our ideas.

See below for how each topic explored has changed the design and execution of some of our sub-project ideas. See our integrated practices page for a detailed overview of how human practices has shaped our whole project.See below for how each topic explored has changed the design and execution of some of our sub-project ideas. See our integrated practices page for a detailed overview of how human practices has shaped our whole project.

Understanding ageing: From the beggining

Our experience at the Dementia care home really gave us an insight to the life of an elderly person with an age related disease, we loved listening to the stories of the elderly over a cup of tea! Not only could we understand first-hand how Dementia has impacted their lives, but we could ask our potential end users directly if they would go as far as synthetic biology to prevent them from getting Dementia and other age-related diseases.

Our interaction with the elderly pushed us to go further and actually personally find out how it is to be old, which is why we designed and tested our very own old people simulation suit. The team members felt that it was a painful, yet eye opening experience and again, really made us realise how ageing can make doing everyday tasks a lot harder to carry out. It was a miniature expense in terms of time and money, but valuable in investment and what we learnt.

At this point, we knew that we wanted to do an ageing project, but we were still deciding which aspect to focus on. The ageing simulation suit and our interactions with the elderly made us realise that ageing is something that causes a lot of problems which make everyday living harder. We wanted to improve the quality of life and by doing so we realised that our therapies should be targeted towards most vital parts of the human body to make the biggest impact to the quality of the ageing populations lives. As a result, we started to research vital organs such as the heart and lungs which really can cause a lot of problems as we age.