From Warehouse to Quayside: SpatialCortex Successfully Validates Wearable Technology Across the UK Freight Sector
- Apr 6
- 8 min read
Updated: Apr 8
How our participation in the Connected Places Catapult Freight Innovation Fund Accelerator — alongside Port of Tyne, Portsmouth International Port, and DHL — is helping reshape how the freight industry manages ergonomic risk.
A Sector Under Pressure
The UK freight sector moves 1.6 billion tonnes of goods every year — an extraordinary operational achievement, where key touch points are enabled by physical labour of the men and women who load, unload, moor, drive and handle freight across the country's ports, warehouses and distribution hubs.
Yet behind this logistical success lies a persistent and growing health challenge. Musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) — injuries to muscles, joints, tendons and the spine — are one of the most common and costly forms of workplace ill health in the UK. According to the Health and Safety Executive (HSE's) latest data (Musculoskeletal disorders - HSE) an estimated 511,000 workers were living with a work-related MSD in 2024/25, resulting in 7.1 million lost working days in that year alone. The HSE consistently ranks transport and logistics among the industries with the highest MSD rates — the result of constant manual handling, sustained awkward postures, vibration exposure and the relentless physical demands of shift work.
The scale of the challenge In 2024/25, work-related MSDs accounted for an estimated 7.1 million lost working days in the UK — an average of 14 days per affected worker. The freight, transport and logistics sector is among those most heavily impacted. (HSE, 2025) |
For freight operators, the consequences extend well beyond individual workers. Injury-related absence, recruitment and replacement costs, reduced operational capacity during peak demand, and the growing challenge of an ageing workforce all compound the problem. Addressing MSD risk is not simply a safety obligation — it is an operational and commercial imperative.
Yet despite its severity, MSD risk in freight environments has remained stubbornly difficult to measure. Traditional manual-handling assessments rely on brief observations, spot checks and self-reporting — methods that capture a snapshot rather than the full picture of physical exposure across a working shift. The freight sector has lacked the tools to truly understand ergonomic risk at scale, in real operational conditions.
That is precisely the gap SpatialCortex was built to fill.
The Freight Innovation Fund Accelerator
The Freight Innovation Fund (FIF) is a £7 million programme funded by the UK Department for Transport and delivered through Connected Places Catapult — the UK's innovation accelerator for cities, transport and place. Its purpose is to close the gap between innovative technologies and real-world freight sector adoption, supporting SMEs with up to £150,000 in grant funding to conduct structured technology trials with established industry partners. Read more about the program: Freight Innovation Fund - Connected Places Catapult
The programme is designed to be rigorous and commercially meaningful. Selected companies do not simply demonstrate their technology in controlled conditions — they embed it within live operations, working directly alongside freight operators to generate evidence, refine their solutions and build the case for wider deployment. Trial design training, monitoring and evaluation, investment readiness coaching and marketing support are all built into the six-month programme.
SpatialCortex was selected to participate, conducting real-world trials of MOVA — our wearable sensor and AI analytics platform for ergonomic risk management — across three industry partner sites. The partners represented a deliberately diverse cross-section of the freight sector: a major port, an international passenger and freight port, and one of the world's largest logistics operators.
Read more here: SpatialCortex Selected for the Freight Innovation Fund to Trial MOVA in Live Freight Environments
Introducing MOVA MMH: Continuous Ergonomic Risk Assessment and management platform
MOVA is SpatialCortex's flagship platform for MSD risk management in physically demanding roles. It combines lightweight wearable sensors with an AI-powered analytics engine to deliver something that has not previously been possible at scale in operational environments: continuous, objective, shift-length data on how workers' bodies are actually being used.
Where conventional risk assessments offer isolated observations — a few minutes of observation producing a score that is then applied broadly — MOVA captures every posture, every lifting movement, every sustained position and every exposure to vibration across an entire working shift. This transforms how organisations understand risk.
MOVA's core capabilities include:
Automated, HSE-aligned ergonomic risk assessments generated directly from real-world movement data
Continuous exposure monitoring across full shifts, not observation windows
Real-time posture feedback to workers, reinforcing healthy movement habits in the moment
AI-generated insights that support targeted interventions — from engineering controls to training adjustments
Enterprise-level dashboards enabling health and safety teams to track risk trends across teams, roles and sites
MOVA is available in two configurations tailored to different operational contexts: MOVA MMH for manual material handling environments, and MOVA SEAT for roles involving prolonged seated operation — such as machinery operators and freight gate personnel.
Our Trial Partners
One of the strengths of this trial was the breadth of environments in which MOVA was deployed. By working across three distinct operational contexts — bulk port handling, maritime passenger and freight operations, and large-scale logistics distribution — we were able to assess MOVA's performance across a genuinely representative cross-section of the freight workforce.
Port of Tyne A major multi-modal port on the River Tyne handling cargo, vehicles and bulk freight. The trial was conducted within their warehouse 21 and the container yard — environments that involve intensive manual handling alongside machinery operations including platform pallet trucks, tug driving and restacking. MOVA MMH were deployed across warehouse operatives and machinery operators, capturing the ergonomic demands of both physical handling and vehicle-based tasks. |
Portsmouth International Port One of the UK's busiest passenger and freight ferry ports, serving international routes across the English Channel. The deployment focused on two operationally distinct roles: Quay Assistants performing mooring operations at Berths 2, 3, 4 and 5 — physical, variable and weather-exposed work — and Freight Gate Operators engaged in sustained seated tasks within gate booths. This contrast between high-exertion manual work and static sedentary roles gave MOVA MMH and MOVA SEAT a demanding dual test of its versatility. |
DHL One of the world's largest logistics and supply chain operators, with extensive UK distribution infrastructure. The trial was conducted as a proof-of-concept deployment within DHL's Southern Distribution Centre, covering both warehouse operations and loose-load trailer environments. The focus was on quantifying manual-handling riska and lifting demands across different zones of the distribution centre — data that has immediate relevance to ergonomic risk management at scale. |
What the Trial Set Out to Achieve
The six-month accelerator programme was structured around four clear objectives, each designed to move MOVA from a validated concept towards commercial readiness:
Validate MOVA as a scalable MSD risk management solution capable of operating reliably across diverse freight environments
Demonstrate the operational value of continuous ergonomic monitoring compared to traditional assessment methods
Assess MOVA's ability to support training enhancement, operational decision-making and targeted safety interventions
Build the commercial and product evidence base to support enterprise deployment across the freight and logistics sector
These objectives shaped both the trial design and the evaluation methodology, ensuring that the programme generated commercially meaningful evidence rather than merely technical validation.
What We Found: Headline Outcomes
Full case study reports for each partner trial are in preparation and will be published separately. In the meantime, we can share headline outcomes that speak to both the technical performance of MOVA and the broader significance of this work for the freight sector.
Reliability in Real Operational Conditions
MOVA delivered over 95% data uptime across all planned work shifts at all three partner sites — in environments ranging from exposed quayside berths and container yards to busy distribution centre floors. More than 30 automated, HSE-aligned risk assessments were generated directly from live shift data. This level of data integrity, sustained across the varied and often challenging conditions of port and logistics operations, is a meaningful indicator of the platform's readiness for operational deployment.
Workforce Acceptance
Twenty-nine workers across eight distinct job roles participated in the trials. All were willing to wear the sensors throughout their shifts. Participants reported no disruption to their normal work activities and no discomfort during use — findings that are particularly significant given that workforce acceptance is often cited as a key barrier to the adoption of wearable monitoring technology. In unionised environments, where transparency and trust are especially important, this level of acceptance reflects well on both the design of the technology and the way in which the trials were conducted.
Evidence to Support Operational Change
The data generated by MOVA gave our partner organisations tangible material with which to begin exploring interventions. Rather than acting on assumptions or periodic manual assessments, safety and operations teams could see, in clear and quantified terms, where and how physical risk was concentrated across their workforces. Early indicators of change include enhanced training approaches informed by posture data, integration of MOVA reporting into health and safety workflows, and — at Portsmouth International Port — the installation of a capstan at one of the berths to reduce manual strain on mooring operations. A post-mitigation assessment is planned to measure the effect of that intervention.
💡 Why this matters The ability to measure ergonomic risk continuously — and then connect that data directly to operational changes — represents a fundamental shift in how freight organisations can approach workforce health. MOVA makes the invisible visible: turning physical exposure into evidence, and evidence into action. |
Why This Trial Matters
The Freight Innovation Fund Accelerator is, by design, a high bar. Being selected for the programme means demonstrating not just a credible technology, but a solution with genuine commercial potential and a clear pathway to sector-wide adoption. Completing the programme — with rigorous evidence from three partner trials across some of the UK's most operationally demanding freight environments — is a significant milestone for SpatialCortex.
The trial has confirmed what we believed at the outset: that traditional, observation-based approaches to ergonomic risk assessment are not sufficient for the demands of modern freight operations. The sector needs tools that are objective, continuous, scalable and designed for operational realities rather than ideal conditions. MOVA has demonstrated, across warehouse, port and distribution environments, that it can be that tool.
Equally important is what the trial has shown about the appetite for change within the sector. Each of our partner organisations engaged seriously with the MOVA data — not as a compliance exercise, but as a genuine contribution to how they think about workforce health, operational efficiency and long-term resilience. That engagement is an encouraging signal for what comes next.
What Comes Next
The trial was a validation exercise. What follows is deployment. We are currently engaged in follow-on conversations with our trial partners about embedding MOVA into their ongoing safety and occupational health workflows — moving from programme-based pilots to routine operational use.
In parallel, the experience of the trial is informing the next phase of product development. This includes:
Enhancing the wearable system's durability and usability for rugged, weather-exposed operational environments
Consolidating AI-generated risk assessments and mitigation guidance within a more streamlined reporting interface
Strengthening the enterprise dashboard to support multi-site monitoring, team-level analytics and large-scale deployment
Detailed case studies for each of the three partner trials — Port of Tyne, Portsmouth International Port and DHL — will be published in the coming months. These will provide a fuller account of the deployment methodology, findings and operational implications at each site.
Beyond the immediate partner network, our longer-term ambition is to drive enterprise-level adoption across the freight, ports and logistics sector, and to extend into adjacent industries where physical risk profiles are similarly demanding. We are also actively exploring partnerships with insurers, occupational health providers and health and safety consultancies — organisations that are well-placed to accelerate the adoption of data-driven approaches to MSD prevention and to integrate MOVA into the broader health and safety ecosystem.
SpatialCortex's MOVA platform was validated across three UK freight and port environments — Port of Tyne, Portsmouth International Port, and DHL — as part of the Connected Places Catapult Freight Innovation Fund Accelerator, a £7 million programme funded by the UK Department for Transport. Across 29 workers and eight distinct job roles, MOVA MMH and MOVA SEAT achieved over 95% data uptime, generating more than 30 automated ergonomic risk assessments aligned with HSE frameworks. The trial demonstrated that continuous wearable sensor monitoring can replace traditional observation-based manual handling assessments in operationally demanding environments including warehouse handling, quayside mooring, container yard machinery, and freight gate operations — reducing musculoskeletal disorder (MSD) risk through real-time posture feedback, AI-generated mitigation recommendations, and data-driven intervention planning.
