Glasgow-based technology firm Archangel has recently secured a share of a £600,000 Smart & Connected Social Places (SCSP) 5G Innovation Fund, with support from Bield and the Digital Health & Care Innovation Centre (DHI), to deliver a ground-breaking integrated housing and care technology project in South Lanarkshire.
The initiative focuses on one of Bield’s retirement housing developments in Biggar and is one of eleven cutting-edge digital health and technology projects across the Glasgow City region to receive funding from the UK Government’s Department of Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT). Over six months, the "Evaluating Care Delivery in Rural Settings" project will serve 25 properties, incorporating advanced technology to support independent living for older tenants.
Central to the project is the deployment of discreet sensors throughout the development and individual homes. These sensors monitor key environmental and wellbeing metrics, such as temperature, humidity and motion, ensuring that both property conditions and tenant welfare are consistently maintained.
Data gathered from these sensors is securely relayed through Angelnet, Archangel’s resilient connectivity network, which features broadband, mobile and wireless LoRaWAN (Low Power Long Range Wide Area Network) technology. The collected data is made accessible through Archangel’s Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) platform, enabling seamless monitoring and timely interventions when needed.
Gavin Wright, Head of Property Management at Bield, commented: “This project enables us to explore IoT (Internet of Things) expansion as part of our digital strategy and aligns closely with the Smart Social Housing initiative which aims to tackle a major challenge in housing, health and social care: the fragmentation of data across disconnected systems.”
Tom Morton, Archangel’s CEO and founder, explained: “Data related to social housing, health, care and wellbeing is currently fragmented across multiple vendor systems and siloed datasets. This disjointed approach creates inefficiencies and hinders the large-scale adoption of IoT due to the costs associated with numerous single purpose systems and specialised skills required to manage them. It also weakens efforts to support integrated healthy, sustainable homes initiatives.
“This project showcases a smarter more cost-efficient approach to resolve these challenges using social housing data collection and presentation from multiple IoT devices via a unified communication infrastructure. It offers a single, holistic view of individuals and their home environments, allowing for collective decision-making and timely interventions.”
Professor Soumen Sengupta, Director of Health and Social Care for South Lanarkshire, said: “A key objective of South Lanarkshire’s Local Housing Strategy is that people with particular needs are better supported to live independently within the community in a suitable, sustainable home. The integrated deployment of digital technologies will have an increasingly important role in this and I am looking forward to the sharing of the lessons learnt from this project across our local authority area, the wider Glasgow City region and the country as a whole.”
Janette Hughes, Director of Planning and Performance with DHI who alerted Archangel to the funding opportunity, added: “This is ultimately about making housing safer and more responsive to personal circumstances for communities and allowing people to live happier, longer and more secure lives in their own properties.
“It is fantastic to see a Scottish business securing this type of funding as our role as a national innovation centre is to support research and innovation into digital health to help the people of Scotland live longer, healthier lives while supporting businesses access new funding and business opportunities.”