Black Space Technologies is one of the many cutting-edge early-stage businesses in the West Midlands which are causing ripples in the wider life sciences sphere. HENRY CARPENTER catches up with the bosses of the Brindleyplace-based firm whose vision is to help those suffering in some of the world’s least accessible environments.
Imagine being a medic on a battlefield in a far-flung land, and being able to give effective and potentially life-saving treatment to a wounded soldier thanks to a small, pioneering piece of technology.
Both you and the soldier would give it eternal thanks.
The ‘it’ in this instance is equipment designed and issued by Black Space Technology, an early-stage telemedicine firm which, although based in Brindleyplace, is being used across the globe by different nations’ armies and peacekeeping forces.
At its most basic, we are talking about the ability to access live video conferencing on a system which has the patient’s medical records already stored.
And it’s not just appropriate in military zones either. The tech could equally be used by a rescue team on the slopes of a mountain as part of a failed climbing ascent or, closer to home, an air ambulance doctor treating a car crash victim in a remote part of the UK.
This is explained by Black Space’s founder and CEO, David Morgan, and colleague and finance director Davinder Sidhu.
As Morgan says, the focus is being able to deliver first-class healthcare into any remote environment.
“Everyone has a right to top-level healthcare wherever they are,” he says.
To understand where Black Space breaks the mould of conceptually similar equipment, it’s right there in its name.
“We called it Black Space because of something called black space innovation,” he explains.
“This reflects how a small, agile company can compete with much larger players through innovation. Our solutions are smaller, lighter and faster than traditional systems, and that combination is the real black space innovation as it allows us to close the care gap at the point-of-injury and save lives.”
On-the-ground technology wasn’t new, but it existed in much clunkier, heavier monitoring systems, when with Black Space nothing larger than a mobile phone is needed.
So how exactly does it work?
“You need android phone, on which is a configurable application which consists of an electronic patient record, a vital sign monitoring screen that takes the data from third-party monitoring devices and displays it on the device, and the ability to open up a low-bandwidth, high-definition video conferencing link to the next echelon of care.
“So if I’m a combat medic in somewhere like Ukraine, someone gets shot and they’ve got a chest wound, and I’m not too sure how to operate, I can then link back to my next echelon of care, perhaps a medic in theatre, and they could give me advice on how to treat them.
“We talk about closing the care gap, which means reducing the time to a minimum from the point of injury or illness to when you receive definitive medical care.
“Now, that might be using the technology by the combat medic – or paramedic, if it’s a civilian case such as the Everest expedition we recently supported – and linking into the next echelon of care where an expert can leverage advice.
“If they wanted advice, they could actually have a live video conference back to the UK to get further back-up advice if necessary.”
It sounds like a must-have for any military organisation but breaking into established markets is no easy feat. Despite that, Black Space has been seeing steady increase in turnover since it started to gain commercial traction.
“Initially our focus was R&D intensive, and that process lasted for three years,” says Sidhu.
“Since we commercialised in about 2021, we’ve seen approximately 50% year-on-year increase in turnover, with collaborations with the UK’s MoD, Canadian Armed Forces, and the United Nations who are scaling up their peacekeeping missions.
“The three main missions at the moment are in South Sudan, Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the plan with the UN is to mainstream telemedicine across all the organisation’s global peacekeeping projects.
“There are three more missions which we will be involved with this autumn.”
So Black Space has come a long way in a relatively short time, especially considering the Covid pandemic put a kybosh on almost all free-flowing commercial activity.
But although the company launched in 2018, its roots as a concept can be traced back several years beforehand when Morgan was working as a consultant at Heartlands Hospital in inner-city Birmingham.
“It all really started when a guy walked into my clinic for a routine appointment complaining that had been waiting for a long time, he had lost his day’s wages because he was self-employed, and it had cost him a tenner in parking charges.
“He said he was fed up and asked if there was a better way I could look after his wound, and wondered if you could just send in a photo every week.
“I thought well there must be a good use for mobile phones so I set up a company which sought to look after patients at home – so called telehealth.”
It had a good start, with the firm ultimately monitoring over 10,000 patients at home for the NHS. A consultant at Heartlands, who happened to be the lead medic for Northamptonshire Air Ambulance, asked if the system could be replicated for the charity. In corporate terms, the firm was providing British Telecom with its telehealth so it was seeing successful results across a number of disciplines.
Unfortunately though, the NHS’s adoption of digitalisation wasn’t quick enough or effective enough, in Morgan’s view, and this led to the firm “running out of runway”.
It folded – just as Morgan had started doing some work with the military who had seen the equipment he had been supplying to the air ambulance.
They liked what they saw – apart from the size which they said was too large and heavy . . . and that led to the quick formation of Black Space Technology.
An early client was the British Army, particularly units which dealt with anti-terrorist actions, and then another contract was issued from the Spanish Air Force for using Black Space’s system for evacuating patients from extreme areas by helicopter.
“That’s when the company first took off,” says Morgan. “But things really started to change in 2021 when we were tipped off by the UK embassy in New York that the UN was looking for a telemedicine system.
“We put in a bid but the UN abandoned the tender and just dealt directly with us. The collaboration was formalised on Christmas Day in 2023. It’s gone from strength to strength and we look after the peacekeepers and anyone that’s injured on the battlefield.”
I’m interested to hear why Morgan and Sidhu seem to prefer working with the military or peacekeeping sources rather than, say, partnering with the NHS and ‘civvy street’ in general?
“The military, as you would expect, are decisive, focused, they know exactly what they want, they know exactly when they want it and they know exactly what to do with it when they have it,” says Morgan.
“Likewise the UN are very focused on what they need to do. They are very passionate and great to work with. In short, they are great partners and that’s why we focus on the military and NGO space.”
That’s not to say Black Space would discount operating more in the civilian space.
“We hope to launch a product which deals with civil contingency,” says Morgan. “With the instability around the world, there’s a very high risk that there are going to be increased terrorist attacks or indeed straightforward military attacks on urban conurbations which will lead to hundreds, if not thousands of injuries.
“We’ve developed a system that will bring order to chaos because very few emergency services can cope with large numbers of casualties. What we’re bringing is a paradigm shift by enabling emergency responders, be they police, ambulance or fire services, to know exactly what’s going on and where it’s going.
“The other part is, if you’ve got large numbers of casualties, you want to triage them and assess the severity really quickly. We have something called the ten-second triage tool which is an automated system that the NHS uses so you not only triage large numbers of casualties, but more importantly match the casualties to the right hospitals.
“It mitigates against the problem of the local hospital surge when everyone ends up in the closest hospital. Our system matches the patient to the definitive care they patient need so you actually spread the patients out to the appropriate hospitals to avoid surge and inappropriate transfers. That’s where we think our civilian play will be.”
In a way though, it doesn’t really matter whether the focus is national or international for Black Space. It can turn on a sixpence because the beauty of the system is that its ‘skills’ are transferable.
As well as the rapid electronic patient record (EPR) system with its inbuilt telemedicine capabilities, the firm also has various side projects on the go. One example is a product for the MoD where they had a challenge of wanting to use heavy-lift UAVs – huge drones capable of lifting 300 kg, not only for supply but also for casualty evacuation, or ‘casevac’ as it’s known.
“If you’ve got an unattended casualty you really want to know what’s going on mid-flight,” says Morgan. “So we developed a slightly different technology for automated casualty monitoring during flight which means that when the casualty is on board, they can be seen and the vital signs can be monitored in real time, just in case anything serious happens.”
The company’s focus might well be a global one, but both Morgan and Sidhu are proud of the firm’s Birmingham roots and acknowledge the collaborations with any number of West Midlands institutions, not least Birmingham City University and also Business Growth West Midlands, the small business support arm of West Midlands Combined Authority.
“BGWM supported us with a grant that allowed us to visit AidEx Geneva, which is a huge humanitarian expo,” says Sidhu.
“That’s where we met a Japanese SME business which operates a smart eye camera which detects eye diseases, cataracts and so forth.
“We also involved Birmingham City University and entered an international submission, which was successful with Eureka Network and funded by Innovate UK, and we look forward to collaborating with them going forwards.”
Morgan takes over. “Visual loss around the world is a huge problem especially in places like Africa. And a lot of it is preventative, and a lot of it can be cured by early diagnosis. But obviously in Africa, you’re challenged by the fact that there aren’t enough doctors and the distances to travel between villages is huge.
“What we’re developing is a device that can attach to an android phone that you can use to take a picture of anterior and posterior eye disease chambers, and then use AI to make a diagnosis which integrates with our telemedicine solution.
“And on that basis, the ones that desperately need help can be triaged in a much faster way than exists at the moment.”
Black Space’s potential seems limitless, given that it can be used in almost any environment, from jungle to battlefield to the sides of the world’s tallest mountains.
Right now it feels it is poised to scale a series of new heights.
