At Circadacare, we're developing innovative technology to help people live independently and safely in their own homes for longer. Our pioneering solution, Heleos, uniquely combines AI-powered monitoring with advanced circadian lighting to enhance wellbeing and deliver peace of mind to both users and their carers. The UK faces significant demographic challenges, with the population of those aged 75 and above set to grow by 29% by 2035\. This is creating unprecedented pressure on our health and social care systems, which already struggle with staff shortages and limited resources. The rising cost of care adds further strain to family and local authority budgets. With residential care costing over £60,000 annually per person, solutions that extend independent living deliver significant economic benefits. While various technologies exist to support independent living, current solutions are often intrusive, expensive, or require complex installation. Many systems operate in isolation, creating a fragmented and difficult-to-manage technology landscape. Heleos addresses these challenges through an elegant, all-in-one solution that combines sophisticated monitoring capabilities within a standard light bulb form factor. Our innovation is twofold: the Heleos smart bulb provides automated circadian lighting -- a technology proven to improve sleep, mood and cognition, and to reduce falls, while embedded sensors invisibly monitor daily activities and wellbeing. This data generates personalized insights for both informal and professional carers through our secure, interoperable platform. The system integrates with existing care management platforms, ensuring that vital information reaches the right people at the right time. This project focuses on enhancing Heleos' capabilities through advanced machine learning, enabling more sophisticated pattern recognition and predictive insights. By accelerating our development and market entry, we aim to establish Circadacare as a leader in affordable care technologies that preserve independence and dignity. This advances the UK's position in a rapidly growing global market projected to reach £60 billion by 2032 (Fact.MR, 2022), while delivering meaningful social impact through improved care outcomes and reduced healthcare costs.

At Circadacare, an innovative Newcastle-based start-up, our mission is to enable individuals to live safely and independently for longer. Our innovative product, Heleos, combines advanced circadian lighting technology with AI-enabled remote monitoring to enhance wellness and deliver peace of mind to both users and carers alike. Like many developed economies, the UK has a rapidly aging population which is creating new social and economic challenges. By 2035, the number of people aged 75 and above will have increased by 29%, however, our existing health and social care infrastructure is already under strain. 2.6m people over 50 in England alone are currently unable to access the care they need, and there are over 150,000 unfilled care staff vacancies. The increasing cost of care is also creating real pressure on both family and local government finances. Our aim is to address these challenges by providing the tools to allow elderly and vulnerable people to maintain their independence and wellbeing for longer. Technology enabled care can play a huge role in this but current products do not provide a complete answer. Instead, they offer a wide variety of potentially intrusive, costly, specialist and/or technologically fragmented solutions. Our innovation, Heleos, changes this. It offers a unique, affordable, all-in-one solution that combines AI-powered behavioural and wellbeing monitoring with market-leading circadian lighting technology. The system's innovative design, which incorporates a discrete, affordable, and easy-to-install lightbulb form factor, sets it apart from other assistive technologies in the market. Embedded sensors provide personalised wellbeing insights and alerts to carers and healthcare professionals, while circadian lighting improves sleep, mood, and cognition, and is proven to proactively prevents falls. Women in Innovation funding will be instrumental in further developing Heleos' market-readiness by supporting the creation of new machine learning tools for accurate and more individual-centric welfare insights. The project, led by our COO Dr. Tallie Bush, will play a crucial role in accelerating our commercialisation and growth strategy and securing our competitive advantage in a fast-moving sector. This supports our vision to become the leading global provider of affordable care technologies which protect user independence and quality of life, cementing the UKs role in a rapidly growing global market worth up to £60bn.

The ageing population presents a challenge to an already overstretched health/social-care system, prompting an urgent need for supportive technologies that promote independent living, improve quality-of-life, and reduce healthcare cost burdens. There are currently 850k (mostly elderly) people living with dementia in the UK alone, a figure which is expected to double by 2040\. Our system meets the needs of this demographic through augmented carer-caree relationships, faster responses, improved healthcare integration, reduced health/social care demands, improved healthspan & quality-of-life, aiding early diagnoses. Now, the **DementiaCare** product will develop a smart light bulb that incorporates circadian-enhanced lighting with low-resolution activity sensors and uses combined acoustic and basic vision data in advanced AI approaches to track gradual/sudden cognitive decline. The resultant system alerts carers to incidents ensuring rapid responses to sudden episodes of confusion and appropriate management of gradual decline. In combination with the circadian lighting augmentation, the product will help to keep those suffering from dementia living safely in their own homes for longer, reducing pressure on an overloaded care system while giving family and carers peace of mind that individuals are still cared for when alone.

This project will develop a smart lighting system that dynamically responds to chicken behaviour to improve welfare and productivity. The right lighting sequence in chicken barns is well known to improve FCR and overall productivity. However, farmers are still largely monitoring for problems through manual surveillance and lighting control gives only day/night cycles and blanket control of the whole barn. Our work will develop a system that uses chicken vocalisations to identify problems of clustering and bullying and then modify the light levels to cause chicken dispersal, thereby reducing occurrence of problems.