Innokas Medical has recently signed a cooperation agreement with Finnish company GrainSense Oy that develops the first truly hand-held device for grain quality measurement. The actual work has started already with the prototype production, and the contract covers also the design and development work related to the manufacturability and maintenance of the device.

GrainSense Oy is a spin-off company from the Technical Research Center of Finland, VTT. GrainSense’s mission is to expand to the worldwide markets with their cloud-based services and technologies based on the optical technology solutions. The company’s innovation is the first truly hand-held device for grain quality measurement. The aim is to enable farmers, seed producers and plant breeders to rapidly measure the key parameters of their crops in the field and to make decisions that can improve profitability and pricing. The device measures for example the protein content of cereals and other crops as well as the content and moisture of oil and carbohydrates; on the basis of these measurements for example the value and the processing costs of the harvest can be calculated and evaluated already when the grain is still growing in the field.

“Our hand-held device enables farmers, seed producers and plant breeders to rapidly measure the key quality parameters of their crops, and to make decisions that can improve the profitability and pricing. This kind of information can be seen as a selling point as it can improve the position of producers in the grain markets”, says GrainSense’s CTO and Co-Founder Ykä Marjanen.

The cooperation between Innokas and GrainSense has started with prototype production and product development project where Innokas and GrainSense finalize the manufacturability of the device. The product will be launched to the market during next spring. GrainSense’s CEO and Co-Founder Edvard Krogius says that Innokas was selected as a partner especially because of its strong experience as well as the quality factors. He feels that the cooperation between Innokas and GrainSense has gone smoothly, and he especially wants to emphasize the high-quality customer experience Innokas has offered to GrainSense.

“The cooperation with Innokas has worked well so far. We’ve started the cooperation with prototype versions of the device, but we recently decided to move the design and development work related to manufacturability and maintenance of the device to Innokas, too. We see the development work that is closely related to cost-efficient manufacturing is meaningful to do with Innokas as they will take care of the manufacturing of our product. We chose Innokas to be our partner because the company was very competitive with the price and the quality. Innokas’ very strong history within the medical device development and manufacturing, as well as the great references, also strengthened our decision making. Especially valuable characteristic I’d like to emphasize is the high-quality customer experience Innokas has offered us; we’ve felt that Innokas has treated us as a valuable customer already, even if we’re just about to start growing as a company”, Krogius tells.

Innokas Medical’s Account Director Mikko Kangas sees that as Innokas is taking care of both manufacturing and related product development work, Innokas can create a concrete and valuable benefits to GrainSense concerning the cost-efficiency and the product launching schedule. He sees the project as very interesting one to Innokas - even if the company usually focuses on different kind of projects related to medical devices only.

“GrainSense’s device is very interesting and will surely revolutionize the tracking of both quality and cost-efficiency of the cultivation in the coming growing seasons. I see that the cooperation agreement Innokas has signed with GrainSense indicates that Innokas’ processes and procedures that has been built according to regulations and different kind of requirements conforms also with other industries when we’re talking about the manufacturing of very challenging and quality critical products”, Kangas concludes.