description
- Heat stress (HS) is a major issue for industrial workers operating in warm climates and/or wearing protective clothing. Associated costs are £504 per worker annually, with hospitalisation costs £40,000+ and fatal incidents £350,000 (US). Evidence suggests incidents are vastly under-reported with <85% of some workforces exhibiting symptoms of HS, resulting in reduced productivity. In addition, 4.5m injuries and 105m lost productivity days are associated with fatigue. Inova has developed Bodytrak(r), an 'NSC Best-in-Show' award-winning monitoring system used to acquire vital signs (VS) in real-time and enable intervention to prevent health incidents. From a small in-ear device, core body temperature (CBT) and heart rate (HR) are continuously measured and transmitted in real-time via cellular/WiFi/BLE to the Bodytrak cloud platform where vital signs/alerts are displayed on a dashboard. This has been supported by 4 InnovateUK grants (£560k) and is currently being launched. Inova will develop this MVP to be more scalable by making the system ATEX/IECEx compliant for exploitation into hazardous environments. The project outputs will be pre-production prototypes and a deployment-ready platform to carry out extensive reliability/certification/customer in-field testing. The addressable market represents £11.49Bn globally (£469m UK) (2020), with growth rate 10-42%, and serviceable market £187m. The new capability will rapidly scale to provide an ROI of 1,191%.