Sweet dreams of funding for medtech business
Medical device and software company, SleepCogni has been awarded a third round of funding from the UK’s innovation agency, Innovate UK.
The funding, a continuity grant, will be used to pivot its existing, patented wearable medical device that provides behavioural treatment for insomnia, onto an online platform in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The grant will enable the Sheffield firm to expedite its vision for a virtual care pathway which combines a Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) biofeedback device with real-time analytics; enabling clinicians to diagnose and treat sleep disorders remotely and removing geographical barriers to care delivery.
Since inception, SleepCogni has formed exciting collaborations with several organisations, including two prestigious universities and world-leading CBT-I specialists. To support this next phase of development, SleepCogni will collaborate with DareData Engineering and Amazon’s AWS Activate program to deliver cloud-based data collection, processing, analysis and visualisation.
This Innovate UK funding, combined with an additional financial injection means the businesses has secured a six figure investment over the last month. This latest round of support from the UK’s innovation agency also builds on SleepCogni’s ‘Biocatalyst grant funding’ awarded last year, which supported its large-scale clinical trials in collaboration with Sheffield Hallam University.
Richard Mills CEO of SleepCogni said, “This grant will allow us to rapidly pivot in order to meet the demand of the new world of virtual care and remote monitoring. We’re passionate about improving the patient experience and to this end, our focus will be on ensuring patients feel engaged and informed throughout the identification, assessment and management process by providing access to their physiological data – levelling out the information exchange and knowledge sharing between clinician and patient.
“We selected DareData as data partner because of their capability and experience in understanding physiological data. Their expertise will support the build of a robust, scalable and secure data infrastructure platform”.
Sam Hopkins, Co-Founder and Senior Data Engineer & Scientist at DareData Engineering, added, “We are excited to assist in architecting the data infrastructure for SleepCogni’s unique wearable device. The number and granularity of the data streams that need to be gathered, processed, analysed, and turned into actionable information provide the type of rare technical challenge that we thrive on.
“DareData is committed to delivering a state-of-the-art technical solution built on top of Amazon AWS and Snowflake Data Warehouse. These technologies will provide us with everything that is required to safely encrypt, store, anonymise, and analyse the plethora of sensor data that is required to make a real difference in a person’s life”.
