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

• The grant has been awarded to Navenio’s ‘Intelligent Workforce Solution’, to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on healthcare systems
• 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.”