Our first company of the month for 2025 are Belfast Based, software company Kinsetsu who are changing the landscape of digital technology, IoT technology and complexity to support government strategy in innovation.
Kinsetsu alleviates the pressures of lack of resources, time and budgets in hospitals by digitally transforming processes and reducing unnecessary manual tasks. Introducing sensors along with their IoT platform, ktrack, Kinsetsu seamlessly connects and visualises assets whether inventory, medical devices, pharma, beds, or vehicles in any global location. This data visualisation ensures insights into a system flow, which normally wouldn’t be there, ensuring the right product is in the right place at the right time. This reduces the time to task-completion, whilst improving team moral and patient experience. One example of many: visualisation of medical devices to ensure they are available, whether in accident and emergency, hospital ward or community locations and that they have been serviced, calibrated and are safe to use.
This platform is sensor-agnostic, meaning it can seamlessly integrate with various sensor technologies, allowing Kinsetsu to digitally twin an organisation’s entire inventory. As a result, every asset is visible and reported on in real time, providing comprehensive insights immediately and empowering organisations to optimise operations, enhance efficiency, and reduce costs.
The idea for Kinsetsu emerged when Co-Founders Joanne O’Doherty and Jackie Crooks identified a gap in the enterprise IoT space, specifically location awareness technologies. The duo leveraged their extensive business relationships, knowledge, and experience to work with a global provider of location-based technologies who needed a partner to deliver in the UK & Ireland. This led to securing the NHS as their first customer.
Support for their journey came from Invest Northern Ireland, several competitive innovation awards, and their deep understanding of market needs, honed through years of experience. Their drive, passion, and belief in their vision enabled them to attract an extraordinary growing team of like-minded professionals who are committed to Kinsetsu’s vision of automated visualisation of assets and flows, unburdening teams, and improving safety and efficiency in complex environments.
Joanne and Jackie felt that Northern Ireland was an excellent foundation for starting up a company due to the access of talent, supportive business environment, strategic location and the close-knit community and collaboration.
As Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Kinsetsu, Joanne leads the company’s strategic direction, ensuring it stays true to its mission of delivering positive outcomes, making location awareness meaningful to improve efficiency of flow, making tangible difference to each customer. Her role is multifaceted, combining leadership, vision-setting, and fostering a culture where employees thrive, feel valued, and contribute meaningfully to the company’s growth. Joanne draws on over two decades of experience in the ICT industry, leveraging her background in software development, systems analysis, and business development to guide Kinsetsu’s growth. She focuses on building strong relationships with customers, ensuring their needs are met with bespoke solutions that drive efficiency and deliver real-world impact.
As founder’s Joanne and Jackie are dedicated to empowering their team, fostering a collaborative and inclusive workplace, and ensuring that Kinsetsu’s solutions positively impact not only its customers but the broader community. Joanne explained “We’re utilising our growing healthcare customer base to further explore trends such as the digital twinning of hospital inventories, enabling complete visibility of equipment and resources, which will streamline workflows and free up valuable staff time.”
Through recent wins in the commercial sector, Kinsetsu are capturing data from environmental sensors for energy, carbon, particulate matter, and other environmental factors to help customers measure their carbon footprint and ensure healthy working environments. The ethos of Kinsetsu is to bring this technology back into the platform, bringing additional value at zero uplift in cost to the NHS. Additionally, as the healthcare sector moves toward predictive maintenance and resource optimisation, Kinsetsu are integrating advanced analytics into their IoT platform to help organisations proactively manage assets and reduce costs. Looking forward, Kinsetsu are preparing to align with emerging healthcare trends, such as personalised care delivery and home-based health monitoring, ensuring our solutions continue to meet the evolving needs of patients, clinicians, and healthcare providers.
“If you feel you can make a positive difference to a customer’s day, go for it! As founders we feel every opportunity should be grasped, you don’t know where one opportunity will lead to another. Our journey went from tracking healthcare assets and visualising patient flow to smart transport location solutions, and within manufacturing, assembly line visibility with CO2 emission reporting.
“The mission is simple, each project is about people, about flow through data visualisation and most importantly about giving back time, improving safety and reducing risk. Working locally with the Belfast Health and Social Care Trust, the South Eastern Health and Social Care Trusts along with Health boards in England and Wales has been the cornerstone of our business. The 2025 outlook is positive, a recent win with our Healthcare Partner, Vodafone, within the NHS in England underlies the growing need for intelligent locating services within the health service. We don’t underestimate the challenges our NHS customers are under at present; we only hope to bring value through automated insights to alleviate operational challenges by removing unnecessary delays and frustration.
“As CEO, I feel we all need to ensure to spend time engaging, collaborating, working with our teams and our customers to continue the adoption of innovation. The team in HIRANI has enabled an ecosystem to make change and bring innovation to help all of us improve services, that ultimately, we all need. And for those girls out there that feel that it’s too much of a stretch, so did we!” said CEO Joanne O’Doherty.
Follow Kinsetsu on their social channels to keep up to date with the news:
Wesbsite: www.kinsetsu.co.uk
X – @kinsetsuuk
LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/company/kinsetsu
Instagram – @kinsetsuuk
