SBRI: monitor and visualise domestic pollution to safeguard health

Overview

Innovate UK, working on behalf of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), will fund organisations to develop and demonstrate new products and/ or services. These must enable households to measure, visualise and respond to harmful household air pollution in order to safeguard health.

Scope

Action to reduce the health impacts of air pollution tends to focus on outdoor sources, notably emissions from vehicles. However, indoor levels of some air pollutants are often far higher, and many end up in the external atmosphere. Particulate matter (PM), non-methane volatile organic compounds (NMVOCs), and sulphur dioxide (SO2) are all present in domestic environments and can be detrimental to health.

The aim of this competition is to support the research and development (R&D) of products and/or services which monitor a wide range of household pollutants. These solutions must raise awareness of the potential impacts of the pollution in the home, providing timely and appropriate information so that householders can make effective choices to protect themselves, their families and their neighbours.

Your proposed solution must:

• be innovative
• be practical and deliverable
• take affordability into consideration
• monitor more than one pollutant

Innovate UK particularly encourage applications that:

• go beyond monitoring pollutants to create visualisations and information which promote responses that safeguard health
• explore and trial mechanisms to aggregate household data, securely and in line with data protection best practice, in order to improve strategic understanding and response to poor indoor air quality
• consider user experience throughout the design and development process
• show a clear plan for commercialisation and a route to market for affordable, developed solutions
• show a strong connection between both the proposed activities and solution to relevant academic research on protecting health from indoor exposure to harmful pollutants
• show scalability and replicability and how the solutions could adapt in response to new understanding of indoor air pollution issues over time
• set out clearly how solutions might be tested in a real world setting as part of phase 2

At this stage contracts will be given for phase 1 only. You must define your goals and outline your plan for phase 2. This is part of the full commercial implementation in your phase 1 proposal.

You must demonstrate a credible and practical route to market, so your application must include a plan to commercialise your results.

Eligibility

To lead a project, you can:

• be an organisation of any size
• work alone or with other organisations as subcontractors

Contracts will be awarded only to individual organisations. However, if you can justify subcontracting components of the work, you can employ specialist consultants or advisers. This work will still be the responsibility of the main contractor.

Funding Costs

A total of up to £100,000, including VAT, is allocated to phase 1. Phase 1 is focused on supporting feasibility studies. These should result in a technical and commercial specification, detailed design package and test plan for a technical solution.

The competition is expected to fund up to 5 projects in phase 1. Individual feasibility study research and development (R&D) contracts will be up to £20,000, including VAT, and can last for up to 3 months.

The total funding available for the competition can change. The funders have the right to:

• adjust the provisional funding allocations between the phases
• apply a ‘portfolio’ approach

Your application must have at least 50% of the contract value attributed directly and exclusively to R&D services, including solution exploration and design. R&D can also include prototyping and field-testing the product or service. This lets you incorporate the results of your exploration and design and demonstrate that you can produce in quantity to acceptable quality standards.

R&D does not include:

• commercial development activities such as quantity production
• supply to establish commercial viability or to recover R&D costs
• integration, customisation or incremental adaptations and improvements to existing products or processes

Phase 2

Phase 2 will be focused on developing a prototype and undertaking field-testing to demonstrate the effectiveness of the solution. It is planed to fund up to 3 contracts of up to £300,000 each, including VAT, for projects lasting up to a year

Exclusions

Innovate UK will not fund projects which:

• focus primarily on outdoor air pollution
• monitor only one pollutant
• provide no actionable feedback to householders