Navenio, an AI-powered platform designed to help locate people in hospitals and other indoor locations where GPS is ineffective, has raised £9 million ($ 11 million) in a series A round of funding led by QBN Capital. The raise comes as health care systems around the world are feeling the pressure of the COVID-19 crisis. Among other things, this has meant variable staffing levels and a greater need to quickly deploy key personnel — such as cleaners and porters — where they are needed most.
While GPS is the established location technology for countless applications in the outside world, it’s not so useful at finding people or things in expansive buildings spread across multiple floors. Navenio is setting out to solve this problem through a combination of sensor fusion technology, smartphones, and basic building maps. The technology can be deployed in a number of ways depending on the use case — including on-device or in the cloud — and can be integrated into any third-party app or platform. Navenio also provides its own app to make its location engine more easily available.
Founded in 2015, Navenio is a spinout from the U.K.’s University of Oxford. Navenio CEO Tim Weil said having another $ 11 million in the bank will increase the company’s presence in its domestic U.K. market and help it expand into the U.S. and Asia, where it already has a “number of evolving partnerships.” Other investors in the company’s series A round include G.K. Goh, Hostplus, BigPi Ventures, Oxford Investment Consultants, Oxford Sciences Innovation (OSI), IP Group, and the University of Oxford.
Sensors
Navenio uses what is known as pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) technology that leverages a smartphone’s built-in sensors such as accelerometers and magnetometer to determine the movement of the user, including the distance and direction of travel. It then uses probabilistic map-matching algorithms to figure out the most likely previous and current location of the user — all that the client has to provide is a multi-floor plan of the building.
The Navenio platform also learns the layout and and traffic flow by reading existing radio signals (e.g. Bluetooth, Wi-Fi) in a building to create an ambient signal map, with each part of the building given its own unique localization signature. If the environment changes, for example if radio signal-emitting devices or hotspots move around or are replaced, Navenio identifies this and remembers for future reference. But perhaps more importantly here, building layouts can frequently change, and automated signal-mapping is one way of ensuring that Navenio always has an up-to-date map of a facility.
Above: Building a signal map with Navenio
It’s also worth noting here that Navenio is developing crowdsourced auto-mapping technology, which it claims can physically map a building based purely on the movements of the users, bypassing the need for the client to provide floor plans at all. The company said that it is currently piloting this as part of two projects in the U.K.
While Navenio’s technology can be used in any large indoor environment, for now its entire focus is on health care systems, with 13 hospital sites in the U.K. currently under contract.
Although Navenio was already working with hospitals, the COVID-19 crisis may give its technology a greater significance. If a particular ward or waiting room needs to be urgently sterilized, Navenio could help managers more easily find the closest cleaner to attend the scene, or the most suitable porter can be identified to transport equipment or a patient between departments. It can also be used to monitor vulnerable patients as they are transported between locations.
Above: Navenio
So in effect, Navenio is more than a simple location platform. It feeds into organizations’ broader task-management workflow — it gives visibility into where everyone is in real-time, allowing them to delegate jobs to the right people. But perhaps more important here is the ease with which the technology can be deployed — it doesn’t require any dedicated infrastructure such as beacons, and manual building surveys are not required.
