Background
Æther grew out of the Matrix, a set of assessment tools built for NHS mental health services, and it's in daily use for aviation safety work now. This page covers how it came about, who builds it, and what we can tell you about data and access at this stage.
NHS mental health services
The first Matrix was built in 2015 for early intervention in psychosis teams in the south of England. Two more followed, for perinatal mental health and for children and young people's mental health, both also in the south of England.
Each service was asked only the questions it could answer directly and easily from its own work, so sessions were short and the answers were accurate. It saw its results straight away, rated against national guidance, before sending them for review. Commissioners and clinical networks saw the same results on a dashboard, region by region against the recommended standard, and could click through to the providers in a region and the services within each one. The perinatal Matrix brought maternity, health visiting, talking therapies and specialist mental health teams into one view, although they're run by different organisations and cover different areas.
Until then, that picture came from reports put together after the data had been collected, often months later, when it was too late to act on or to inform decisions about funding.
EIP Matrix · 2015
Early intervention in psychosis, for Time4Recovery, the south of England's EIP programme. Commissioned by Oxford Academic Health Science Network. Its reports were used in parliamentary discussion by Norman Lamb MP, and it was central to the programme team's nomination for a BMJ Award in 2017.
PMH Matrix · 2017
Perinatal mental health, commissioned by Thames Valley Strategic Clinical Network. Endorsed by NICE, and a finalist and runner-up in the NICE Shared Learning Awards 2019.
CYP Matrix · 2018
Children and young people's mental health in Surrey, Sussex and Kent, commissioned by a group of clinical commissioning groups and designed with clinicians and managers from NHS, council and charity services.
Aviation
Airlines use line observation audits to understand how flights go in normal operation, away from the simulator and the check ride. A trained observer sits on the flight deck with the crew's agreement, on the understanding that nothing recorded will be used against them, and notes the threats and errors that came up and how the crew handled them.
The framework behind this is threat and error management (TEM). A threat is anything outside the crew's control that makes the flight more complicated, such as weather or a late runway change. An error is something the crew did or didn't do that took the flight away from what was intended. If either goes unmanaged, the aircraft can end up in what's called an undesired state, such as being too fast on approach, and the point of the audit is to see which of these patterns recur across many flights.
Harlow Stewart's work on Æther
Harlow Stewart runs line observation audits, such as HLOSA, and safety and organisational surveys, such as ISAT, for airlines. Both are carried out in Æther. An observer records each flight sector by sector and phase by phase, with the threat and error sequences inside them, and the airline sees the results on dashboards and in Excel reports.
The reports include charts tracing how threats led to errors and undesired states, and rates adjusted for the number of flights observed, so that fleets and bases of different sizes can be compared fairly.
From the Matrix to Æther
While we were rebuilding it, Æther went by the internal project name SOMAT, short for "Son of Matrix". It keeps the idea behind the Matrix tools, linking structured assessment to outcomes, and we began rebuilding it in September 2024 so that one platform could serve any sector in its own terms.
That was the main reason for the rebuild. The questions, the words used on screen and the branding are all set for each organisation, so a housing inspector and an airline observer can use the same software without either of them seeing the other's vocabulary.
Other sectors
We've built example versions for seven sectors, from social housing to pharmaceutical supplier audits, using fictional organisations and made-up data. None of them is in use yet, and each will be designed with a pilot partner first, because the questions worth asking in a contact centre or on a housing inspection are best decided by the people who do that work.
The people behind it
Harlow Stewart
Harlow Stewart brings the aviation safety expertise and runs observation and survey programmes for airlines on Æther. If you're an airline or another aviation organisation, Harlow Stewart is your first point of contact.
Elan Smart Solutions
Elan designs, builds and supports the platform, and runs the pilots in other sectors, so questions about the software, how it's hosted or how a pilot would work are best sent to us.
Data and access
Access is granted against your own organisation's structure, so permission given for a region covers the teams and sites within it and nothing outside it. Records a person isn't allowed to see are filtered out before they leave the database, so they never reach that person's screen.
Every change to a session, a survey or a permission is logged with its old and new values. Surveys are replaced by new versions instead of being edited, so a past result can always be traced back to the exact questions that were asked.
Hosting, data processing and security are better discussed with your information governance team directly than summarised here, and we'll do that before any pilot data is collected.
Technology
Æther is a web application built on Laravel 11 (a widely used PHP framework) with a React and TypeScript front end, so there's nothing to install beyond a current web browser.
Changes to how it behaves are made alongside automated tests, of which there are now over 1,200. Results can be exported to Excel at any time, so you can keep your own copy of everything that's been recorded.
Pilot partnerships
If you'd like to see Æther working with your own questions and data, a pilot runs for six months and we agree its scope with you before it starts.