Dr Ben Oldfrey

Dr Ben Oldfrey is a lecturer with the Global Disability Innovation Hub at University College London in the UK, primarily working on the FCDO AT2030 programme, looking at models of AT provision for low resource settings globally. His work is centred on the opportunities for local production systems and innovation to plug gaps in AT services, with distributed manufacture, repair services and sustainability strategies being key topics of interest. For 2.5 years during the Covid-19 pandemic, he has also led on FCDO Covidaction Local Production Local Solutions, which supported 9 innovators across 5 African countries and Nepal with financial and technical innovation assistance to produce over a million critical products for their communities in the face of global supply chain disruption. He also conducts more fundamental work on soft material printing, building on his PhD which combined the development of hyper-elastic nanocomposites with deep learning algorithms to produce soft skin-like sensors for prosthetic and orthotic applications. His recent paper ‘Additive Manufacturing Techniques for Smart Prosthetic Liners’ won the Jack Perkins Prize for Best Paper in Medical Engineering and Physics in 2021.