Navenio secures £400,000 UKRI grant funding to ease COVID-19 impact on healthcare

Navenio’s infrastructure-free indoor location tech will enable teams to be in the right place at the right time, using smartphone data

London, Oxford, UK. 9th November 2020. Navenio, the healthcare scale-up whose location-based technology has been shown to double the throughput of hospital teams, has secured a £400,000 grant from the UK government and Innovate UK, the UK’s innovation agency, to address the impact of COVID-19 on hospitals.

Navenio, a spin-out of Oxford University, provides infrastructure-free indoor location solutions, the equivalent of GPS for use indoors, to power a range of apps and platforms in sectors including healthcare. The money was awarded to projects that seek to mitigate the health, social, economic, cultural and environmental impacts of the COVID-19 outbreak.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated an already urgent need to improve resource management in hospitals across the UK due to increased demand and staff sickness. Hospitals use Navenio’s AI-led ‘Intelligent Workforce Solution’ (IWS) which is built on indoor geolocation technology. Relying only on smartphone data, it requires no infrastructure and no building surveys.

To address this need Navenio will accelerate the processing of maps by further automating feature extraction and processing of floorplans, which will enable a ten-fold improvement in deployment speed. Navenio will also extend the current IWS functionality of its software to accommodate the rising demand for cleaning, infection control, risk assessment, and gatekeeping of patients’ movements, which will be critical in managing COVID-19 in understaffed hospitals. In addition, it will provide data analytics which will draw insights on resource utilisation and how to increase capacity and reduce risk. This will result in the first UK-wide statistics on resources utilisation and will help local management make key decisions across hospitals and at different stages of the pandemic.

Ian Campbell, Executive Chair of Innovate UK commented: “With COVID-19 still an ever-present challenge in the UK and across the globe, our working lives, social encounters, and travel plans are continually being disrupted. Businesses like Navenio have stepped up to the challenge and produced technology which aims to solve these issues. Those awarded funding from our competition will support the UK in delivering potential solutions and services to facilitate our recovery from the pandemic.”

Tim Weil, CEO of Navenio, added: “We are delighted to have received this funding from UKRI and Innovate UK. With COVID-19 still presenting significant challenges to healthcare systems this funding will help us to continue dramatically improving patient flow within hospitals around the UK by prioritising tasks for individual teams. With COVID-19 cases rising it is crucial that hospitals are prepared and have access to the best technology to assist them during these tough times.”

About Navenio

Navenio was spun out of the University of Oxford in 2015 and has an established team of more than 60 people which continues to grow. Navenio is a finalist in the KPMG British Tech Pioneers 2020 Programme and its technology has won both commercial and academic awards.

Navenio’s location technology is developed from world-class University of Oxford science. In brief, using only a smartphone’s sensors, the fusion of four unique technologies creates a highly scalable indoor location, providing actionable insight immediately. Privacy and security are inherent within the Navenio technology and the company is Cyber Essentials certified, GDPR and NHS Data Security and Protection Toolkit compliant.

About UKRI/ Innovate UK

Innovate UK is part of UK Research and Innovation, a non-departmental public body funded by a grant-in-aid from the UK government. For more information, visit the UK Research and Innovation website.

We drive productivity and economic growth by supporting businesses to develop and realise the potential of new ideas, including those from the UK’s world-class research base.