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MESSAGE FROM MYH AMBASSADOR

My name is Mark Blundell, CEO of MB Partners and former F1 racing driver. I'm delighted to be the Ambassador of Mind Your Head- a fantastic new initiative by the charity Headway Cambridgeshire.

Mind Your Head has the potential to transform the lives of people with brain injury and even to prevent it from happening in the first place.

I encourage everyone - whatever your background, education, age, skills or life experience to get involved. You don't need to be an inventor, entrepreneur, scientist, engineer or even in business.

Will you get involved?

We're asking everyone in the county of Cambridgeshire to join us at the new University Technical College in Cambridge on the evening of Friday 3rd October when all you have to do is form into teams of SOLVERS

and come up with ideas for new products or services that could help people with brain injury as well as those who care for them. We'll have lots of experts on hand to help you.

At the end of the evening, if you've come up with an interesting idea, you can enter your team into the Mind Your Head Challenge. If you do, you'll have about 8 weeks to develop it into a business-based solution.Then, on the evening of Friday 28th November, we will be getting everyone together again to hear a selection of the ideas that various teams have developed. We're hoping some investors will join in (just like Dragons' Den - only a friendly version!).

The Challenges:

1) Develop a solution to help people, especially people in a wheelchair with restricted mobility, to pick things up, for example from the floor or a cupboard above head height.

2) Many people with brain injury forget how to perform basic tasks and have to undergo training to do things we all take for granted. Can you devise solutions to help people perform two tasks: 1) make a cup of tea; 2) cook a simple meal?

3) Devise a solution to protect cyclists' heads when they fall off their bicycles.

4) A group of people with brain injury have developed a board game to help them improve their memory.  This challenge is to investigate the potential global demand for this game, find a manufacturer and distribution outlets, and secure sales.

5) Develop a solution to help people with brain injury, and their friends and families, quickly and easily identify and access all the resources and support available to help them recover or adapt to life with brain injury.

6) People with brain injury can suffer from "reduced sound tolerance". For some people with this condition (called hyperacusis), all sounds can be too loud. Other people lose the ability to filter out sound e.g. in a railway station with friends, they can't filter out the background noise and hear the voices of their companions.The challenge is to devise a solution to help people with reduced sound tolerance.

7) People with brain injury can lose the ability to communicate with their friends, family and carers particularly when it comes to explaining how they are feeling. They struggle to articulate the sense of anger, frustration, confusion, sadness and lack of hope they feel after their injury. This challenge is to develop a solution which enables people with brain injury to communicate how they are feeling but without actually speaking.

To help us plan for 3 October, we're asking people to register as "Solvers" now. It only takes a couple of minutes. Click here to see who else has registered.

For more information:

visit our website

http://mindyourhead.brainhtc.org