Where Are They Now: Digiflec

Digiflec, a CivTech 6 company, completed the Accelerator just over a year ago and we caught up with their Director, Steve Gillan, to find out how the company has developed since….

Steven Gillan, Director, Digiflec

“Our CivTech Challenge was, ‘Can tech help manage traffic and road infrastructure used by commercial operations in rural and remote communities?’  

Stirling Council and Forestry and Land Scotland (FLS) wanted to understand how environmental factors and traffic flow impacted on the condition of the older public roads in and around the village of Balquhidder, in Perthshire.  

Our answer was to develop a data collection system which would produce an extremely accurate digital picture of what was going on.

By deploying IoT sensors at various relevant sites, we learned how different environmental factors impact on the road surface.  We collected data about road surface and ambient temperature, humidity, rainfall, culvert water levels, and soil moisture. FLS roads are largely water bound Macadam, which is weakened when wet, so this information was of particular interest.

We also created a system which can detect and differentiate road using entities (e.g., types of vehicles, pedestrians, cyclists etc) Built in-house, this system works in all weather and lighting conditions, and gathers information about the speed of the entity and the direction in which it is travelling.  This allows a better understanding of how the road is used and how its condition is affected. That real-time data is then combined with infrastructure information collected from our custom-built mobile mapping system. We enrich this data to highlight the condition of the roads, indicating the location of potholes, vegetation, roadside assets, and power lines, to produce a digital twin of the real environment.  

The information gathered can then be used to help organisations manage their roads, giving them the opportunity to deal with potential problems before they impact on road users, as well as helping them to control traffic congestion.  
 
Our pre-commercial project work with FLS will finish on the 31st of November when we hope to move forward regularly applying the product.

However, it was in trying to deliver for FLS that we encountered another challenge that should help us considerably in scaling our business. 

Creating a digital twin of a forested environment is challenging due to the tree canopy cover limiting GPS coverage so we had to work with partners to develop new software to improve location accuracy in GPS denied environments. 

Armed with that new software, we are now ready to take the next step and turn our attention to the public road network.
 
Big cities present their own challenges, but we can now produce great results in environments where GPS can be limited such as in tunnels or in the shadow of tall buildings so our next step is to start a conversation with local authorities to develop the product for the public road network, including the other challenge sponsor, Stirling Council.
 
Getting involved with CivTech has helped us immensely. At the outset, I was the sole member of DigiFLec, but now we have 4 employees, with an ambition to scale and a clear pathway to growth. 

My advice to anyone thinking of getting involved is don't go into it half-heartedly. You will get out what you put in. It’s very challenging and very fast paced but also very rewarding.

To learn more about Digiflec and how they approached this Challenge, you can watch their Demo Day 6 presentation