New Year Honours 2024: PervasID founder Dr Sabesan Sithamparanathan made an OBE for innovative RFID technology and promotion of STEM
Dr Sabesan Sithamparanathan, the founder and president of Cambridge company PervasID, has been awarded an OBE for services to innovation technology and the promotion of STEM subjects in education in the King’s 2024 New Year Honours List.
An enterprise fellow at Girton College, Cambridge, he founded PervasID in 2011 and has pioneered the world’s most accurate battery-free real-time location tracking technology.
Born and educated in Sri Lanka, he came to the UK to study electronic engineering, arriving in Cambridge as a student electronic engineer at Arm, before commencing a PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2007.
Under the supervision of Professor Ian White, in the Department of Engineering and at Corpus Christi College, he invented and developed the world’s most accurate passive ultra-high-frequency (UHF) radio-frequency identification (RFID) location tracking system that would significantly increase the range and accuracy of passive RFID tag systems.
RFID systems use electromagnetic fields to automatically identify and locate tags and the objects they are attached to. The tags each carry a unique identity and are passive, obtaining their energy from the electromagnetic fields and, therefore, needing no batteries or other power source.
As founder and president of PervasID, Dr Sithamparanathan successfully grew his company into a multimillion-dollar global enterprise, raising more than $10m in investment and launching superior products that are transforming retail, healthcare and aerospace industries.
“I am absolutely delighted to have been recognised in the New Year Honours list; this is a great honour and testament to the hard work and innovation of the entire team at PervasID,” said Dr Sabesan Sithamparanathan. “Our products offer a national and international benefit and we will continue to pioneer technology that has a wider value to society as a whole.”
Dr Sithamparanathan’s technology has been adopted by major retailers around the world to improve their retail inventory management by accurately tracking goods in stores.
It integrates with third-party stock management applications to give retailers a graphical map interface that shows the location and movement of all tagged goods, preventing losses by offering real-time visibility, and enabling timely restocking, and improving click-and-collect and online order services.
PervasID – winner of a Queen’s Award for Enterprise in 2021 and winner of previous Cambridge Independent SME Cambridgeshire Business Awards – has an exclusive strategic partnership with SML for this sector.
Stanley Black & Decker use the tags in its manufacturing to track supplies from tool cabinets used by aircraft manufacturers. Each cabinet contains over 1,000 tools, which could result in serious safety incidents if any are left inside an aircraft. Foreign object debris (FOD) costs the aviation industry $13billion per year in direct and indirect costs, including flight delays, plane changes and fuel inefficiencies.
Meanwhile, in healthcare, PervasID solutions are deployed in NHS hospitals, including Guy’s and St Thomas’ for tracking surgical instruments to enhance the decontamination and sterilisation processes, and to track hospital assets, ensuring critical medical devices are available at the right place and time.
The need for traceability of medical devices – which was acute during the Covid-19 pandemic – is credited with helping to save money and lives.
