Innovation
Pedigree
Altran Praxis is a high value
systems and
software house; innovation is therefore essential to maintaining that high value and associated market reputation.
Praxis has a long history of innovation in technology, including: software (e.g. HMI), process (e.g. HIPS), tooling (e.g. SPARK) and services (e.g. REVEAL™). This history has included both internal, self-funded innovation and contracted support to leading companies.
Praxis engineers are highly qualified graduates and certified engineers. The Praxis culture promotes curiosity, formal problem solving skills and a Lean Systems Thinking approach; achieving what is required, no more and no less. This combination of skills and culture allows Praxis to deliver appropriate and applicable innovation, based on insights into the problem and the associated state-of-the-art solution, while avoiding the pitfalls of over-engineering. Our clients benefit by having access to easily transferable innovation results and artefacts with an appropriate cost of integration.
Focus
Praxis actively looks to support its clients with innovation to:
- Extend system and product functionality.
- Improve productivity.
- Allow technology transfer across markets.
Approach
The approach used by Praxis is to provide innovation that can be easily communicated and understood across the target organisation or value-chain. This approach is based on the following steps.
- Identifying the innovation requirement and owner.
- Clearly evaluating the scope and context in which the innovation is required.
- Establishing the discipline(s) and skill sets appropriate to the problem.
- Using a lightweight and time-constrained approach to the innovation development.
- Evaluating the result and deciding on further work, commercial proposal or closure.
Praxis always strives to create innovation within an extended perspective by looking at parallel market opportunities and constraints.
Example Innovation projects
- Connectivity platform for integrating mobile device-borne services into in-car man-machine interfaces for a leading automotive OEM
- SafSec, a research project to integrate technology and process for systems involving both safety and security constraints
- Technology to allow automotive start-up and performance constraints to be met within a managed code environment
- SPARK, a toolset and associated process for efficient formal software verification and validation
- Gesture based Human Machine Interface (HMI) technology
Why Altran Praxis for Innovation?
- Demonstrated success in delivering innovation into business and products.
- A flexible model for intervention.
- Several domains for which world-class experts are available.
- Capability to work in a number of implementation technologies and environments.
- An extended support network for expertise and tooling through the Altran group.
Case reference
Gesture and Voice-based Human Machine Interfaces
Challenge
A number of our clients are faced with the need to provide system access to users operating in a context where a keyboard, mouse or touch screen are inappropriate. An example would be a surgeon operating and managing a therapy delivery device or an imaging system. Another example is that of a field maintenance engineer with tools in hand.
Praxis has engaged with a number of potential clients to demonstrate a new kind of
Human Machine Interface based on the integration of voice recognition and 3D gestural input. The approach is to use existing speech technology and motion devices but to rethink the paradigm within which the human-machine interface is designed and constructed. In addition, Praxis is using a formal ergonomic evaluation metric to examine speech and gesture grammar proposals for the tasks under consideration.
Outcome
To date Praxis has demonstrated this approach to clients from a number of industry
sectors and raised significant interest. This has been made concrete by proposals for joint continued development of this approach with the goal of creating pilot systems. Praxis has also generated four potential patents for this work during a six-month period.