I am delighted and honoured to have received this prestigious award and would like to thank the Royal Academy of Engineering, which really is a recognition of the outstanding work being done by the whole team at PervasID and who are all playing an important part in the innovation we are driving.

Dr Sabesan Sithamparanathan

The Silver Medal recognises an outstanding and demonstrated personal contribution to UK engineering, which results in successful market exploitation, by an engineer with less than 22 years in full-time employment.

PervasID backed by leading strategic investors such as Stanley Black & Decker, is the result of Dr Sabesan’s ground-breaking work as a PhD student at the University of Cambridge. His work in battery-free radio frequency identification (RFID) tag tracking has been internationally recognised and has resulted in four patents. As founder and CEO, Dr Sabesan successfully grew PervasID from its inception to become a global enterprise, providing transformative solutions to healthcare, industrial, security, retail and supply chain and logistics sectors with a complete product suite of the world’s most accurate passive RFID readers.

RFID systems use electromagnetic fields to automatically identify and wirelessly track tags which are attached to assets. Battery-free RFID tags contain electronically stored information and can be linked up as components of intelligent networks, with sensors to determine their location from a distance. RFID tags conventionally suffer from ‘dead spots’ where tags are not detected well within the range of the reader. PervasID overcomes this problem and achieves near 100% accuracy in detecting battery-free tags to less than one metre over wide areas. In commercial trials against all other competitors, PervasID achieved more than 99% tag detection accuracy over a 20-metre distance compared with 80% achieved over 2-metre to 3-metre distance using conventional approaches. 

Dr Sabesan’s customers include the largest aircraft manufacturers, Stanley Black & Decker, blue chip retailers and NHS hospitals including Guy's and St Thomas' in London. Stanley Black & Decker also use the tags to track supplies from their tool cabinets used by aircraft manufacturers. Each cabinet contains over 1,000 tools, and it can result in serious safety incidents if any are left inside an aircraft. It is estimated that Foreign Object Debris (FOD) costs the aviation industry $13 Billion per year in direct and indirect costs, including flight delays, plane changes and fuel inefficiencies. In healthcare, PervasID solutions are being deployed in NHS hospitals for tracking surgical instruments to enhance decontamination and sterilisation processes and for tracking hospital assets to ensure that mission critical medical devices are available at the right place and time, for robust and efficient care. The need for this level of traceability of medical devices has been particularly evident in the COVID-19 pandemic. The solution is predicted to save £billions for NHS hospitals and will save lives.

Dr Sabesan won a Royal Academy of Engineering Engineers Trust Young Engineer of the Year award, the Sir George Macfarlane Medal 2016 for excellence in the early stage of his career, an Engineering Enterprise Fellowship and most recently in 2021 has been awarded a Queen’s Award for Enterprise: Innovation.