Asclepius MedTech Leeds wins £100,000 for Surgfit™ remote surgery assessment, one of three firms selected from 100+ entries
Leeds-based health tech firm Asclepius MedTech Leeds has won £100,000 in the Mayor’s Big Ideas Challenge, a £1m programme funded by the West Yorkshire Combined Authority to find solutions to health inequalities across the region. The company’s product, Surgfit, is a disposable wearable sensor that patients wear at home for seven days to assess their fitness for surgery. Mayor Tracy Brabin announced the three winners at a finalists’ event in Bradford on 10 March, selecting Asclepius MedTech alongside Brighouse-based Mind Body Goals and Harmonai Hub from 19 finalists.
What is Surgfit?
The problem Asclepius MedTech Leeds is solving is specific and measurable. One third of NHS patients miss vital pre-surgery risk assessments, and patients from minority ethnic groups and the most deprived communities are 50% more likely to miss these appointments. The current process requires patients to attend hospital in person, which creates barriers of time, travel, and cost that disproportionately affect those already facing the worst health outcomes.
Surgfit replaces that hospital visit with a Class IIa regulated sensor patch worn on the chest at home. Over seven days it records physiological data about the patient’s fitness, which is combined with health questionnaire responses and transmitted in real time to the hospital pre-operative team’s clinical dashboard. The company says the device captures superior clinical data while reducing patient time to just 30 minutes, compared to a full hospital appointment. Co-founders Ramm Mylvaganam and CEO Michael Morgan-Curran are planning a UK launch followed by EU rollout in 2026 and expansion to Canada and the United States in 2027.
“The Mayor’s Big Ideas Challenge has been an invaluable catalyst for our work. It has deepened our understanding of the scale of health inequalities across West Yorkshire and allowed us to further develop Surgfit: a practical solution capable of addressing this challenge in a measurable way. This is not the end of the journey — it is the beginning of implementation at pace.”
— Michael Morgan-Curran, CEO, Asclepius MedTech
Success for West Yorkshire
The other two winners of the challenge were Mind Body Goals, a Brighouse firm that makes Luma³, a screen-free breath work device for NHS patients with low literacy or digital access, and Harmonai Hub, which provides AI-powered preventative wellbeing support for carers. All three winners receive £100,000 plus bespoke commercialisation support from Innovate UK. The 19 finalists each received £20,000, meaning £680,000 from the programme went directly to regional SMEs.
Why this matters for Leeds
Asclepius MedTech, a company founded in the city, connected to Leeds Teaching Hospitals and the University of Leeds through formal accelerator and research partnerships, now winning public funding to commercialise a product with NHS-wide potential. For Leeds’s growing health tech cluster, Surgfit is one to watch.
Learn more about Asclepius MedTech: https://asclepius-medtech.com/
Learn more about Challenge Works: https://challengeworks.org/
