Two Smartline alumni receive prestigious SWAHSN award

Inspire Cornwall and Hunrosa have been awarded further prestigious funding from the Health Equity & Innovation Challenge, following work with Smartline.

This highly competitive award given by the South West Academic Health Science Network (SWAHSN) enables businesses working in mental health to progress their offering.

The successful applicants will each receive a grant for £25,000, helping them to take their next big step in the health sector. After a rigorous selection process, Smartline alumni Inspire Cornwall and Hunrosa, along with a third organisation, won the award.

The DadPad from Inspire Cornwall

Julian Bose demonstrates how to use DadPad.

We supported Julian Bose from Inspire Cornwall CIC to develop the DadPad tool, a guide for new fathers. We enabled Julian to talk with existing users while also accessing research expertise to advance and evaluate the tool. Read more in our Smartline blog.

This award and SWAHSN’s continued support will now help Julian and his team to progress DadPad and to develop their own evaluation capabilities. This will help them to continue meeting the needs of families.

Hunrosa’s story

Hunrosa provides sleep consultancy services for people with health conditions. They are the only private health consultancy in the UK engaged by the NHS.

We helped the team develop their digital evaluation abilities, providing them with the sleep equivalent of smart watches to track sleep patterns and gain accurate data. Hunrosa wanted to move on to a “train the trainer” model to share their expertise with practitioners. They partnered with We Are With You to train staff who support individuals with mental health or addition issues.

Hunrosa’s Sleep Awear Project launched in 2021, using a digital sleep device service to help people accurately monitor sleep.

This award from SWAHSN will enable Hunrosa to build on their training model as they train staff from We Are With You. The opportunity also help the organisation to refine evaluation methods to assess the impact of this important work.

How do Smartline and SWAHSN work together?

SWAHSN is just one of our Smartline partners. Smartline helps businesses to turn an idea into something tangible. We support people with the ideation, concept and prototype stages through our grant funding and In Residence scheme. We also offer Follow-on support to progress and refine the original idea further.

SWAHSN continue to scale up the support with a focus on transforming health through innovation, for example by supporting businesses with product and service development. The Health Equity & Innovation Challenge facilitates funding to take projects even further.

Together we will continue to support businesses along their journey of growth. It was a great moment when we heard that two of our alumni were successful in their applications, and we know that they’ll continue to thrive with this expert backing.