Seaward to invest £700,000 in technology

Dec 14 2007 by Iain Laing, The Journal

AN industrial electronic company has turned to making the latest medical testing technology to boost its sales.

Peterlee-based Seaward Electronics Limited (SEL) is investing more than £700,000 in a project to develop the next generation of technology for servicing and checking medical testing equipment.

Regional development agency One NorthEast is providing a £200,000 Research and Development Grant to help the firm develop the technology, which, if successful, will play a major part in increasing healthcare efficiency, reducing costs and significantly improving patient care.

SEL’s core business is making testing equipment for industrial uses, but increasingly the firm is finding new commercial markets in which to use their industrial experience and expertise.

The company recently successfully launched the Rigel Medical brand. Rigel Medical offer a range of portable electrical safety analysers to healthcare providers, which can reduce the downtime and routine maintenance of life-saving medical machines and clinical devices.

It has seen a gap in the market to further improve the efficiency and effectiveness of work carried out by biomedical and clinical engineers.

SEL is ideally suited to further exploit changes in preventative and routine maintenance of medical electronic equipment mainly due to its close relationship with the medical market.

As a result, SEL recently launched the Rigel 288, the world’s first fully automatic hand-held electrical safety analyser which has been widely heralded as an innovative and user-friendly device radically improving testing performance in the medical devices sector.

Seaward Electronics managing director, Rod Taylor, said: “The Healthcare industry is a highly dynamic industry, changing constantly.

“Medical equipment serves a vital purpose and it is essential that the equipment is always available for use, and that it is safe and regularly serviced and checked to ensure that it is in proper working order and that it is correctly calibrated to ensure that the information given out is true and accurate and fit for purpose”.