Reynold Greenlaw and Andy Muddiman attended the Oxford Startups demo night at Oxford Launchpad in the Said Business School, on 15th May where they demoed the GaitAssist smartphone app that has been developed for the Cupid project. They demoed it pretty much continuously at our very busy table to the many interested attendees and our communications manager Janine Smith joined in to lend a hand. The app continuously compares the gait of a user with Parkinson’s disease during walking with[...]

We recently started a new project – EmerGent, which is a 3 year European project researching the impact of social media by emergency services during a crisis. Whenever there’s a large fire, riot, earthquake or other crisis a lot of information immediately appears in social media – some valuable, some completely erroneous. With our partners we are developing tools and techniques for mining and validating that content. The EU-FP7 EmerGent project has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework[...]

A personal blog post from our Director of Consultancy Projects As well as delivering products, OCC has a team that specialises in custom software development; they are behind the wide variety of case studies on our website. This combination of teams working on custom software and product development & support is, I think, unique. Once a year I take the custom development team out for a day to discuss how we might write even better software. This time we crossed[...]

For our 2013 Christmas do we decided we would visit our colleagues in Poland rather than go for the usual Christmas outing. As Poland tends to be rather chilly in December we opted to hold out until May and hope for some summery weather. So, over a long weekend, we (along with friends and partners) enjoyed the delights of a boat trip, a visit to underground cellars where vodka is made and aged, a walk round a picturesque lake, two[...]

We believe there are many organisations implementing systems that conform to the following pattern: A patient is being supported at home. They wear sensors and/or use a smartphone. Sometimes there is a home unit that wirelessly connects to the sensors/smartphone. The data is securely transferred to a server. There is a browser based application by which a clinician accesses the data. Sometimes the clinician can send data back to the patient via the home unit or smartphone. There may be[...]

Reynold Greenlaw, Director of Consultancy at OCC, recently presented at eHealth and the Brain – ICT for Neuropsychiatric Health held in Brussels on the 5th November 2013. His presentation on Telemedicine and eHealth for Neurology, focused on the OCC’s involvement in the CuPiD Project. CuPiD is a three year EU project powered by an eight member consortium led by the University of Bologna. The CuPiD project is developing and field-testing home rehabilitation services for the major motor disabilities caused by Parkinson’s[...]

Recently Reynold Greenlaw, our Director of Consultancy Projects, talked to 10MinutesWith about building a career as a Software Engineer. In their interview, Reynold covers the hardest and the best parts of working as a Software Engineer. He also talks about his own career path and gives tips on how to get started and what skills are needed. 10MinutesWith is an educational website, focusing on videos designed to help students and graduates understand different jobs and identify a career path. Watch[...]

OCC DevCamp has been a great opportunity to put the day-job to one side and try out some new technologies. Here are some thoughts on how I got on with them. AngularJS AngularJS is Google’s offering in the JavaScript application building framework arena. Having previously used Knockout I wanted to use a different framework for comparison. I’ve felt that Knockout isn’t especially well suited to large applications, and it seems to struggle in terms of performance when handling a large[...]

HTML5 Canvas HTML5 canvas is a powerful little container for graphics which I only used the smallest set of features of. Other features to explore would be changing of line colours/styles, and of drawing shapes. There are also other algorithms for drawing lines (Bezier/Quadratic) that might lead to smoother lines. Problems arose due to different implementations between web-browsers; chrome seemed to fare the worst here, especially when reporting the position of events. Some of the other features of HTML5/CSS3 I[...]

My focus for DevCamp was building an Android app that would interact with the presentation web app in realtime. For that we made use of a toolkit called Xamarin, as well as the ASP.NET SignalR library, and Git for source control. Xamarin Xamarin is a toolkit that allows you to use C# to write code for native Android and iOS apps. I had a good experience with this overall. I hit a small bug where changing the namespace caused a[...]

I spent most of the DevCamp week working on the client applications: the presentation itself (minus the annotations and the graphs), the secondary screen and the audience view. So the new technologies I spent most of my time on were AngularJS and TypeScript, with a little time spent on SignalR. SignalR I didn’t spend much time delving into SignalR, mostly because I didn’t need to. The code to set up a connection between clients and server is very concise and[...]

We’ve already made it to the third of our successful product hackdays, giving our developers a day to work on tweaks, gripes, improvements, or whole new features of their choosing and then sharing those with the rest of the team. The day’s projects Alan – Test scripting improvements I did some prototype work on a new version of our “TPA” test scripting language. I wanted to store a representation of the test objects and commands in the application’s configuration tables[...]

We are very pleased to be listed in the Government’s Digital Market Place, which is for UK public sector organizations to commission suppliers to work in an Agile way on digital projects. See below for a description of “Agile” working. We have been evaluated technically and commercially to supply individuals, or to join an existing team to work on a digital project at both junior and senior levels in the following roles: For Agile Delivery Management: Business Analyst Delivery Manager[...]

Part of our Dev Camp project this year involves being able to annotate a presentation slide using a mouse, finger or stylus. We instantly looked to the HTML5 Canvas element to provide a bitmap drawing surface. Sizing and scaling the Canvas When first trying to create a canvas that overlaid the screen I discovered that they had two height/width properties. canvas.style.height/width – CSS attributes canvas.height/width – DOM properties The CSS attributes can take percentage values (100% in our case), the[...]