Public Funding for Senti Tech Limited

**Background**: SMEs are particularly vulnerable to supply chain disruption. Supplier management takes up considerable time and energy for the whole team and presents significant risks to business continuity and viability. SMEs face further challenges through a lack of leverage in supplier relationships (lower-valued orders), competing against larger, better-established customers for supplier priority. SMEs urgently need supply chains to become more resilient and responsive. Senti-Tech is a medical device developer/manufacturer, creating a wearable smart garment to advance the care of people with long-term respiratory illnesses. We have had numerous suppliers increase delivery estimates after placing orders and even after up-front invoicing; not all attributable to the supply chain crisis. We've been hit by quality issues that set us back by months. We've had the anxiety of suppliers not replying to us. In the worst case, critical components were delayed by over six months. Identification of high-quality suppliers is a lottery: until you place an order, it is extraordinarily difficult to know how well the supplier will perform (even when suppliers are recommended by trusted advisors). **Innovation**: We've fortunately been able to invest in our supply chain, and a combination of staff dedicated to supplier management and internal tools to help with supplier compliance have helped us to manage these challenges. However, we realised that there is a better way. One which would allow any SME to attain the procurement reach of a far larger organisation at a fraction of the cost. **Our innovation**, Supply-Works, is software that underpins a network of SMEs. We share trusted supplier intelligence across this network, helping each of those SMEs to reduce time and effort on supplier due-diligence and get access to an active stream of supplier intelligence data, from late deliveries to broken parts. Our proprietary Trust Score will enable SMEs to know which suppliers are likely to complete their orders without quality or delivery incidents. **Outcomes**: Supply-Works has the potential to significantly impact across the manufacturing supply chain. We'll help SMEs make more informed choices about their suppliers and, in particular, strengthen resistance and responsiveness in their supply chains. We anticipate that this will have many positive effects for the Liverpool City Region and beyond.

**Background:** Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and psoriatic arthritis (PsA) are debilitating conditions that affect 1-2% of people. Irreversible joint damage builds up the longer these conditions remain ineffectively managed or untreated. Over 1-in-3 people with these conditions have to stop work within two years of symptoms starting. Yet, it takes over 6 months from the start of symptoms to seeing a rheumatology doctor. Even then, 40% of patients do not respond to a first trial of specialist treatment that can halt the progression of the disease. Patients must instead try another and another variation of these medications until they find one which works. By the time effective treatment has started, hundreds of thousands of people (in the UK alone) are sadly out of work with irreparably reduced quality-of-life. Currently, diagnosing RA/PsA requires blood tests, joint examination, and imaging (such as Ultrasound or MRI). These tests are expensive and are therefore performed sparingly. There are no existing approaches which could be used by patients themselves to detect active inflammation (the cause of damage in RA/PsA) regularly. However - if such an approach did exist, then people with these conditions would be diagnosed faster and at lower cost (avoiding expensive approaches like MRI) and could be monitored remotely. If we could measure how inflammation in the joints is affected by new medications, we could work out faster when to change to a new drug. **Innovation:** Senti-Tech has completed feasibility work to determine just such an approach. This grant will enable use to develop our approach into the Arthritect system. This system uses bioimpedance sensors (which measure conduciveness of areas of the body; something which changes in inflammation) together with an innovative system to make good contact between the sensors and the patient. This system will be a first-of-its-kind patient-use system to detect active inflammation in the hands, We'll combine daily readings with an artificially intelligent decision support system to provide targeted treatment insights. **Outcomes:** In this grant project, we will refine our technological approach and test this with patients. We will incorporate their feedback improving system usability. Finally, we will take this refined version of Arthritect into a clinical trial to investigate whether or not Arthritect can detect if a patient is responding to a new treatment. Arthritect will enable virtual rheumatology wards, reducing the burden on patients and hospitals. We'll improve quality-of-life through faster diagnosis of RA/PsA and reduce the time-to-effective treatment.

**Background**: Imagine what the world would be like for the 500 million people globally suffering with long-term respiratory illnesses, if their lungs could tell them exactly what was wrong, how their illness was progressing, and precisely what to do about it? Well, they can: the problem is we've been listening to what the lungs can tell us, for the past 200 years, with two rubber tubes attached to a metal cone. The stethoscope is blunt. Respiratory disease affects one-in-five people worldwide. It is the **third leading cause-of-death**, costing the NHS alone £9.1bn/year_._ Across the EU/UK combined, tangible and intangible costs reach **£69bn/year** an**d £240bn/year** respectively. Providing patient care relies on healthcare professionals trained in auscultation (listening to chest sounds) to diagnose, monitor, and determine treatments. At least **50% of COPD hospitalisations** (Echevarria, 2018), **75% of asthma emergency admissions** (NHS, 2010), and **two-thirds of asthma deaths** (NRAD, 2014) **are preventable with optimised care.** Continuous autonomous home monitoring of chest sounds could save thousands of lives each day and improve quality-of-life for millions. Current approaches, including the stethoscope, cannot deliver this. **Innovation**: Senti-Tech will radically address this problem by delivering optimised and personalised respiratory care, through artificial intelligence built onto their patent-pending innovative smart garment, Senti-Wear. By wearing this T-shirt regularly whilst sleeping, Senti-AI will optimise medical treatments giving people back control over their respiratory health and offering them the best possible quality of life. Senti-AI will detect attacks of these diseases and create opportunities for intervening at the earliest possible moment in these attacks -avoiding hospitalisation and improving speed of recovery. Senti-AI will automatically call for help when help is needed. Senti-AI is the stethoscope unchained. **Outcomes**: This project will enable Senti-Tech to build, train, and validate an Artificial Intelligence to monitor the breath and heart sounds captured by Senti-Wear, providing tailored recommendations and advice. Most respiratory illnesses can be treated adequately at home, provided attacks are caught at the right time and appropriate monitoring is initiated. The Senti-AI intelligent device system will democratise this excellence-in-care, eliminating a large portion of respiratory hospital admissions. This innovation will improve quality-of-life, and reduce avoidable deaths through prompt and personalised treatment: tech-enabled precision and predictive respiratory medicine.