Knowing Without Seeing (KWS) – Semiconductor Sensing + Edge AI for Human-State Understanding

The opportunity

Genesis Polymer Innovations Ltd, the applicant company is developing Knowing Without Seeing (KWS) – a purpose-built semiconductor sensing technology with integrated edge AI designed to understand human state from the minimum physical information necessary.

Unlike conventional camera-based approaches, KWS is being developed not to acquire a conventional human image in the first place. Unlike wearables, pendants and alarm buttons, it is intended to operate passively and continuously without requiring the individual to wear, carry, charge or operate anything.

Our first commercial application is assisted and independent living, where continuous passive awareness could help identify movement and activity, safety events such as falls, and meaningful changes over time, while preserving privacy and dignity.

Independent living provides a compelling first application and real-world validation environment. The underlying KWS technology is, however, being developed as a broader human-state sensing platform with potential applications beyond care.

A substantial initial market

The UK and Europe provide a large and growing initial commercial opportunity. Approximately 99 million people aged 65+ live in the EU, alongside a substantial UK population requiring increasingly scalable health and social-care solutions.

Our commercial objective is mass-market rather than specialist deployment. The initial management model targets a KWS home-system selling price of approximately £300 at scale, plus approximately £100 installation and £20 per month monitoring/service revenue.

Our current illustrative five-year commercial model indicates approximately £100 million cumulative revenue, approximately 130,000 systems deployed by the end of Year 5, and approximately £9 million Year-5 EBITDA, subject to technical development and commercial validation.

The opportunity is international, with the UK providing an initial route to market followed by wider European and global deployment.

The technology challenge

Existing sensing technologies range from very simple presence and heat sensors to sophisticated imaging, depth and time-of-flight systems. At one extreme there may be insufficient information for meaningful human-state understanding; at the other, systems can acquire considerably more information than is necessary, increasing cost, computation, power consumption and privacy exposure.

KWS asks a different engineering question: what is the minimum physical information that must be acquired to enable reliable AI-based human-state understanding?

Our industrial-research programme will investigate and develop a purpose-designed semiconductor sensing architecture with integrated edge AI, seeking to minimise sensing, information acquisition, computation, power and cost while retaining sufficient information for useful human-state inference.

An initial technology and prior-art review has identified a credible technology gap worth pursuing. Professional patent and IP work during the programme will validate and refine the protectable territory and capture project-generated inventions.

Project company

KWS will be developed and commercialised through Genesis Polymer Innovations Limited, a dedicated UK company established to hold the KWS technology, receive project investment and provide investors with a clean investment vehicle focused on the development and commercialisation of KWS.

Genesis Innovations Ltd is the founder's established technology and business-support consultancy and will continue its existing consultancy activities separately. Arun Luther is CEO of both companies.

Development and investment

We have defined a £600,000 industrial-research programme for the Innovate UK Investor Partnerships – Advanced Computing Technologies and Semiconductors competition.

The proposed funding structure is:

£600,000 total eligible R&D project cost
£420,000 proposed Innovate UK grant (70%)
£180,000 company-funded project contribution (30%)

The Investor Partnerships structure additionally requires a minimum £420,000 total aligned private investment.

We are therefore seeking an approved Innovate UK Investor Partner to lead and participate in the aligned investment round, alongside potential strategic and other external investors.

We are assembling the specialist semiconductor, sensing, AI, manufacturing and commercial capability required to deliver the programme. We also have encouraging early engagement from the care sector, including potential strategic investment, sector input and access to future validation environments.

We welcome discussions with investors interested in semiconductors, AI hardware, edge AI, intelligent sensing, AgeTech and healthcare technology, together with strategic technology, validation and commercialisation partners.