Proud of our Oxford Roots; Excited about our Global Ambitions
Oxehealth was born in Oxford University's labs, founded by Head of the Department of Engineering Science, Professor Lionel Tarassenko. This week, the University released a video (watch it here) featuring us in their #StartedinOxford September celebration of Oxford's entrepreneurialism. So we've paused to reflect on our roots and how far we have come since starting as a big idea in the Institute of Biomedical Engineering ("IBME").
An Oxford academic's dream
"What if a doctor in Africa could download an app onto their smart phone that would use the phone's own camera to read human vital signs just as accurately as the wired medical devices in the Intensive Care Unit at Oxford's John Radcliffe Hospital? How many babies might that save?"
Professor Tarassenko's provocative question has turned into Oxehealth. Our mission is to help care for people better by monitoring health everywhere using video data be that the young, vulnerable, sick or elderly. Our Oxecam technology provides contactless heart rate, breathing rate and other vital sign data from a distance of several metres and is able to monitor health in a wide variety of conditions, including total darkness.
Why is our technology important?
Just down the road...
Today, we work from Magdalen College's Oxford Science Park but the seeds of Oxehealth were sown a few miles down the road at the IBME. The Institute was founded to combine medical knowledge with engineering expertise to help tackle the biggest health challenges of our times (for example, chronic disease management in ageing populations, an area in which Oxecam should make a major contribution).
We are very proud of our IBME roots and we still take the IBME approach of combining medical insight and need with engineering problem solving. We also hugely value our on-going research programmes with the Institute most notably, at present, our Digital Health in Connected Hospital project.
So, we hope we can continue to grow and to play a part in realising that original vision for the IBME of seeding great population health solutions that scale across the world. Hopefully that would make Professor Tarassenko doubly proud he also founded the IBME.
Oxford hub, global reach
We are firmly rooted in Oxford but we have global ambitions.
At heart, we believe our Oxecam technology can help transform the practice of medicine globally by giving healthcare professionals medical grade heart rate, breathing rate and blood oxygen data in situations where it was previously too expensive or too difficult to acquire them, over long periods of time. With video data, we can also develop entirely new health indicators.
We license the Oxecam technology to camera and medical device manufacturers around the world. A good example is our recently announced partnership with the owner of Samsung-branded security cameras, Hanwha Techwin, to target the secure rooms market.
Licence deals with global brands like Hanwha should allow us quickly to distribute our software globally. That's a strategy which has worked well for UK companies looking to scale globally fast witness the recent acquisition of ARM plc by Softbank for £24bn. In fact, we benefit greatly from the presence of Warren East, long time CEO of ARM plc & current CEO of Rolls Royce, on our Advisory Board.
Build valuable products whilst solving really hard academic problems
It's rare to find yourself in a position where there's strong market demand which can only be met through a combination of basic research and novel engineering solutions. We continue to attract a very bright, hugely talented team of PhDs, graduates and innovators to work on technology and software to tackle pressing global health challenges, from low-level image processing to machine learning for big data analytics.
We hire the best in our fields globally but we're delighted that Oxford graduates continue to be represented in our talented team. We are always keen to hear from Oxford students and alumni interested our opportunities for internship or graduate, PhD or experienced hire positions.
The Oxehealth opportunity
If you'd like to join a proud Oxford business with global ambitions offering opportunities to people from all backgrounds to work with ground-breaking science and engineering that turn cameras into health monitors, take a look at our Join Us page.
Or, if you're a potential partner and think our technology could enhance your research or product development/offering, or your research/product could enhance our technology, we would love to hear from you.
As part of the #StartedinOxford campaign, Oxford Innovation has recorded a short explanation of our technology, which can be watched here.
