2 days ago
- Health
- The Herald Scotland
Inside the Edinburgh firm on a mission to end fuel poverty
Urban Tide is a data company focused on unlocking information to deliver targeted solutions to businesses looking to improve sustainability outcomes. The founders met while delivering an ambitious 'Future Cities' programme that made them realise combining datasets was the future of targeted decision-making, but that many barriers stood in the way.
Now the 15-strong company is a key partner in a five-year research project looking to link health data with household data to improve children's health. Specifically, it's looking at preventing the respiratory problems caused by damp and mould in poorly insulated or poorly ventilated homes. It's led by Dr Olivia Swann who is both a paediatrician and a researcher at the University of Edinburgh.
'The work that Livvy [Dr Swann] is doing is pretty fascinating,' Tricker said. 'The UK has the leakiest homes in Europe. It's a combination of having a lot of old stock, the way we build them is not that efficient and we're not really considering the thermal efficiency of buildings.
'The retrofit programme at scale needs to really be ramped up because if we reduce energy, we reduce our bills and make our homes more comfortable. But – and here comes the but –there's a risk if you clad a home and make it nice and insulated, it's not well ventilated. If you don't consider the ventilation systems, you can increase the risk of mould build-up, which can then lead to the risk of black mould, which, if you've children in the house, can lead to an increase in asthma and a whole host of health implications for later life.'
Thanks to Urban Tide's unique access to system data from electricity smart meters, it can provide the research team with information that uses AI and household-level information to predict the risk of fuel poverty. Added to this is the Scotland-wide health data, held securely and strictly anonymised, which Swann's team can overlay with the data provided by Tricker's team, as well as other advanced data sets.
This research, inspired by the children coming into Dr Swann's clinic with respiratory infections, is only possible now that all the pieces of the data jigsaw are available. Currently, it would not be possible even over the border in England, and interest from partners has exceeded all Swann's expectations.
'I've been really overwhelmed not just with the amount of interest but also just how incredibly collaborative and how much goodwill there is from industry, from policymakers and from third sector,' Swann said. 'We arranged a project launch event and I thought it would be 20 people and some sandwiches. Instead, we had 130 people and 50 different organisations. Most of those people I had met on Zoom or Teams, and then they had come in person because they felt so strongly about this issue. I think that is a real testament to how important people think this issue is and the will for it to be better.'
It's the Goldilocks analogy of 'just right' as it applies to the population of Scotland and the quality of the data, alongside the expertise of companies and researchers and the involvement of Scottish government in potentially turning this research into policy that inspires Tricker.
'We're always looking at how we can use data to help solve a number of these large societal challenges,' he said. "So we wanted to build a platform that could bring in real-time data,' he said. 'We work across the transport sector as well, because they collect lots of real-time information. By combining that with other static data sets, you can start to see patterns.
'In the transport sector, for example, we're working with Cycling Scotland and other partners across local authorities and regional transport partners to try and help put in infrastructure where it's needed.'
With this research project involving so many datasets from different partners, including, for the first time, Scottish government data on every intervention made so far to make houses warmer, the ethics of data use have been a priority.
'This data could not be harder to bring together,' Swann said. 'All of the data goes into the National Safe Haven, which is incredibly well protected. The data is then linked there, and it's anonymised before we begin to access it. So we never know who anybody is.
'We have a fantastic patient and public engagement group too and a lot of the discussions we've had with them have been about the acceptability of using these different kinds of data, bringing them together and all of the security measures around them.'
Tricker adds that the anonymity of the data Urban Tide is using is absolutely key. It is not interested in personal details but looking for patterns in usage so the right interventions can be made. It will shortly be launching which will open up the data it has collected on transport across Scotland, including cycling networks, so it can be used to make local and national decisions.
'I'm quite excited about launching to really showcase some of our AI technologies and obviously help to promote more open data generally as well,' he said.
Urban Tide is already working internationally from its Edinburgh base. It is leading an open data training programme for Ireland's public sector to comply with a European directive to make public data more accessible, and the team is also working on smart city plans in the middle-east and Australia.
After 11 years of organic growth, bootstrapping and pivoting as the technology and AI capabilities develop, it is now looking to raise some investment. Assisting with this is Mountside Ventures, which it sees as a 'badge of honour' as it selects a only handful of companies to work with each year.
'The next three years are about really consolidating the business and the technology that we've built across UK and Europe and the next round after that would be to expand into America. We're on the journey of the 'three I's, so there's the identification piece, then there's the intervention and then how do you measure impact? We are also cross-sector. It's one of the challenges of our business, having to work in the energy sector, the transport sector, and then combining data from across the different sources.
'But that's also the opportunity because as more data are being opened up and used, the convergence of all these different types of data really unlocks new opportunities.'
