Healthcare and Wellness Start-up Wins Category at Prestigious MSDUK Innovation Challenge

After a day of live pitches before a packed audience of over 300 attendees and questions from a perceptive and, at times, challenging judging panel, the category winners and overall national winner of the annual MSDUK Innovation Challenge was announced.

Harvinder Power, founder of Motics whose mission is to empower everyone to enjoy effective physiotherapy at home, became the 2019 category winner in the Healthcare & Wellness category.

Speaking after his win Harvinder said, “We were honoured to be a finalist at this amazing competition which promotes innovation through diversity, a quality we strive to achieve at Motic’s.  To win the Healthcare & Wellness category blew my mind!  It will propel us to new heights and help us to achieve our mission of enabling effective, enjoyable physiotherapy for everyone.”

Motic’s was born after Harvinder witnessed his father suffering from Sciatica – a common condition affecting millions around the world, causing chronic leg pain.  It requires daily physiotherapy to alleviate pain symptoms, but the problem, Harvinder noticed, is that the experience is not engaging.  Harvinder’s father received an A4 sheet of paper with a list of physiotherapy exercises, but never engaged and to this day still suffers with leg pain daily.  However, Harvinder noticed that his father enjoyed playing on the Nintendo Wii and wondered if there was a way to make it more useful – providing an experience which engages patients whilst also speeding up recovery.  From there, he discovered that the problem was not just exclusive to patients with Sciatica, but common to all patients requiring physiotherapy – up to 10 million a year in the UK alone.

Motics was born in 2018 with the mission of empowering everyone to enjoy effective physiotherapy at home.

Adds Harvinder, “The device is a compression sleeve with sensors that measure muscle function and stimulate muscle activity.  These are combined with a gamified approach which incorporates physiotherapy movements whilst engaging users, improving adherence, which has been well documented in scientific literature.  This solution enables both improved adherence and the ability for physiotherapists to gain improved insight into muscle function compared to current functional assessments.

“We ran user testing for over 12 weeks and demonstrated a 400% improvement in engagement, a 250% improvement in muscle strength from baseline, 50% reduction in recovery time and 35% reduction in pain symptoms, which gave us a partnership with Imperial College London.  To date we have 15 physiotherapy clinics onboard – based in London and Dublin – who have agreed to trial the produce with real patients as part of a paid pilot programme.”
Headline sponsor and Challenge judge Denis Ford, International Sourcing Leader EMEA, NE/SE Asia and S. Pacific at Cummins, commented on this year’s finalist line up saying, “I would like to congratulate all the finalists.  The quality of the pitches was superb and the finalists did a great job in this pressured situation.  I am proud to have been asked to be part of this Challenge.  Their innovations covered an enormous spectrum of sectors ranging from space technology to portable dishwashers, from pressure-sensing technology to bio-renewable tech that coverts agricultural waste into electricity, and from digital marketing innovations through to cutting edge developments in machine-translation for the medical sector.

“This year’s finalists were based across the UK including Manchester, Leicester, London, Edinburgh, Strathclyde and Hatfield and 31% are female founders.  They also came from a wide spread of ethnic backgrounds including Pakistani, Persian, Indian, Caribbean, African, Chinese and Asian.  Each year this Challenge grows and becomes more and more vibrant and important to innovation generally and diversity specifically.”

Fellow judge, Ray Lambe, Director of Programme Diversity at Digital Catapult added, “Our category winners won because it was clear to all the judges why their idea was important, who it was important to and that it was a deliverable business proposition with clear social and sustainable credentials.”

MSDUK Founder and CEO, Mayank Shah, added, “MSDUK’s aim is to bring together innovative and high growth Ethnic Minority-owned businesses with global corporations who are committed towards creating an inclusive and diverse supply chain and the Innovation Challenge is just one way we do this.

“The theme for the third year of our Innovation Challenge was ‘Better Ideas for a Better World’ and entrants had the opportunity of entering any of four categories which were Industry 4.0, Healthcare & Wellbeing, Social Innovation, and Sustainable Futures.

“The fact that we had 13 finalists rather than our usual 12 is testament to the sheer diversity of applications in this year’s Innovation Challenge, as well as to the quality of the pitches we saw during the semi-final round and the incredible ideas that sit behind those pitches.  It was a very tough day for our judges and again demonstrates the wealth of innovative ideas we have here in the UK within the Ethnic Minority-owned business community.  I would like to add my congratulations to each of our category winners.  I believe that this win will be the start of something very, very special for each of them.”

The national finalists for the 2019 MSDUK Innovation Challenge were;

• Aries VR
• EnergiMine
• Kapsule
• Loch Electronics
• Maji
• Motics – category winner: Healthcare & Wellbeing
• NxSteps
• Pukket – category winner: Social Innovation and overall MSDUK Innovation Challenge winners
• PyroGenesys – category winner: Sustainable Futures
• SmartLingual
• Space Platform Technologies
• Statmetrix – category winner: Industry 4.0
• Waterwhelm

Challenge prizes include;

• £5,000 cash prize for the Innovation Challenge winner plus introductions to MSDUK’s investor network and workshops
• £40,000 worth of business school scholarships at Ivy League Tuck School of Business for the top four finalists
• £100,000 worth of corporate mentoring delivered via a 12 – 18 month corporate mentoring programme with Accenture and Digital Catapult
• 2-year MSDUK Premium Membership with unlimited access to MSDUK Hub Programmes and events for all 13 finalists