Ella Flanagan, a recent graduate of Technological University Dublin, has been named the Irish national winner of the James Dyson Award 2026 for Noli, a wristband that lets mental health nurses call for help without reaching for a wall-mounted panic button.
Noli is a currently a prototype where nurses pull and holds the wristband’s strap for three seconds, which sends an alert to the three nearest colleagues. If nobody responds, the alert widens to more staff across the building. Flanagan takes home the €5,800 national prize, and Noli moves on to the international stage alongside Ireland’s two runners-up.
Why a wall alarm can make things worse
In most mental health settings, staff raise the alarm by pressing a fixed button on the wall. According to the award organisers, that visible action can escalate an already tense situation, and some patients associate it with past trauma. Flanagan’s research with nurses also found that building-wide alarms were sometimes delayed, with staff reluctant to trigger a hospital-wide response or assuming someone else would answer.
The idea comes from close to home. Flanagan has family members working as mental health nurses who have been assaulted at work. It isn’t a niche problem in Ireland either, with 6,090 recorded assaults on HSE staff in 2025, 4,369 of them physical.
How the Noli wristband works
The pull-and-hold gesture is designed to look like someone simply adjusting a strap, so a nurse can call for support while still trying to calm a patient. The system runs on a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) mesh network made up of the wristbands themselves, fixed nodes placed roughly every 20 metres around a facility, and a master node. Wristbands broadcast constantly, fixed nodes relay alerts along the network, and the master node uses signal strength to work out which staff are closest.
Noli has entered the patent application process, and Flanagan says she is reaching out to healthcare innovators and Enterprise Ireland about taking it further.
Ireland’s James Dyson Award runners-up
Iris, designed by Abban Moran, is a headset aimed at taking the guesswork out of concussion diagnosis in sport. It records a player’s eye movements before any injury to set a baseline, then repeats the same tests after a suspected knock, with a built-in AI module highlighting differences to support a physio’s assessment. The aim is to reduce the risk of second impact syndrome, where a further blow before the brain has recovered causes far more serious damage.
Life-Boom, from Ruaidhri Sinnott, targets man overboard incidents on fishing vessels. Water-activated trackers worn by crew send location data to an autonomous searchlight, which fixes a red beam on the person in the water and follows them until they’re recovered, so nobody on deck has to keep constant sight of them when such a task is near impossible. Commercial fishing remains one of the most dangerous jobs there is, with research commissioned by Pew estimating more than 100,000 fishing-related deaths worldwide each year.
What happens next for Noli, Iris and Life-Boom
All three Irish entries progress to the international round of the James Dyson Award. Dyson engineers will select a global top 20 shortlist, announced on 14 October, before Sir James Dyson picks the global winners on 4 November. Global winners receive €35,000 to put towards developing their inventions.
For more on the company’s own product pipeline this year, see our Dyson Unveiled 2026 coverage from Berlin.
