Tag Archives: testing

Absence Management, Awards, HR, HR News, News

ToHealth wins national accolade for new DNA and epigenetics testing venture

A new health screening venture aimed at improving employee wellbeing and reducing workplace absenteeism has won a national accolade.

The DNA and epigenetics testing service launched earlier this year by ToHealth, a division of preventative healthcare specialist PAM Group, was named Wellbeing Initiative of the Year at the Workplace Savings and Benefits Awards.

The awards, now in their 10th year, recognise employer and provider excellence. This year’s ceremony took place at the Marriott Grosvenor Square in London.

ToHealth’s DNA and epigenetics testing is carried out using one saliva sample, from which 1,000 types of DNA are analysed.

The results show whether a person is prone to developing a host of health conditions, such as diabetes, and how they can tailor their lifestyle to lower their risk as well as their biological age.

A person’s DNA holds the essential information about their development, function and growth, and cannot be changed. Epigenetics, however, adds another layer of information, enabling a person to identify how their lifestyle and environment impact the way their genes work, which can increase the risk of illness.

Each test result provided by ToHealth comes with personalised recommendations to support individuals with potential risk areas, including gut and heart health, immunity, injury risk and mental health. All of these help people to understand their biological age versus their chronological age.

The hyper-personalised genetic information and recommendations are accessible via an app, giving individuals an advanced insight into their health at the touch of a button and empowering them to improve their wellbeing and stave off the threat of disease, helping in turn to reduce workplace absenteeism.

ToHealth managing director Kerry-Dene Ihlenfeldt said: “We are passionate about empowering employees to thrive in the workplace. To be recognised with this award gives great kudos to our amazing team for their tireless work, and to our clients for their willingness to trust us to deliver services that improve the wellbeing of their employees.

“We work in partnership with our clients to ensure we offer a tailored and robust service that enables colleagues to perform at their best. Increasingly, businesses and organisations are focused on finding ways to improve the health and wellbeing of their workforce, and understand that prevention is better than cure.

“Our DNA and epigenetics screening provides a personalised and proactive health solution that enables employees to manage their own physical and mental wellbeing, reduce the risk of disease and improve longevity.

“Through testing, an employee can learn how to play the cards they have been dealt to their advantage, how their behaviours and their environment impact on them, and what lifestyle changes they need to make.

“We have an industry-leading offering which makes a tangible and positive difference, and we are immensely proud that this has been reflected with this prestigious national honour.”

ToHealth is partnering with testing company Muhdo for the offering.

The accolade is the latest for Warrington-based PAM Group, one of the largest occupational health, employee assistance and wellbeing providers in the UK. It offers a range of integrated services to public and private sector clients, supporting more than a million employees at over 1,000 businesses and organisations.

5G, News

Infovista and PCTEL collaborate to co-develop 5G testing use cases

Paris, France – July 19 2022 – Infovista, the global leader in network lifecycle automation (NLA), and PCTEL, a leading global provider of wireless connectivity, today announced a strategic collaboration to co-develop joint 5G network testing use cases for mobile operators and industry regulators.

The joint uses cases will bring together PCTEL 5G scanning receivers and Infovista’s market-leading TEMS software to create differentiated and simplified solutions that address specific customer needs and requirements. The initial set of use cases include 5G C-Band interference monitoring, autonomous testing, beamforming configuration validation, automatic site location detection and automated interference detection, and combine PCTEL’s scanners with Infovista’s AI-powered network testing and assurance software.

One of the first joint solutions sees Infovista and PCTEL combining to deliver automated interference source detection and location. Leveraging Infovista’s NLA cloud platform for automated cross-domain troubleshooting, the solution uses network and service performance data from Infovista Ativa™ and its AI/ML analytics engine to rapidly identify and geo-locate cells affected by interference. With the approximate area of the interference identified, Infovista’s precision drive testing algorithms determine an optimal drive route and diagnostics workflow, and then a tester is dispatched with a PCTEL scanner and guided workflow to quickly find the source of the interference.

Faiq Khan, President of Global Networks, Infovista, said: “Mobile operators and regulators are facing new and specific challenges as 5G spectrum is licensed and networks rolled out. Their complexity requires new approaches to network testing, using the latest in AI, automation and cloud-native technologies to reduce the time and cost of network testing and monitoring while also being more accurate and valuable to the business. The strategic collaboration between Infovista and PCTEL is driven by this customer need, and we’re excited about the future opportunities our combined customer program will unlock.”

Arnt Arvik, Vice President & Chief Sales Officer, PCTEL, said: “Today effective network testing and monitoring requires purpose built scanning receivers to measure hundreds of channels across a broad spectrum including 5GNR and mmWave. Testing needs to be fast and accurate, conducted in multiple environments, and it need to be capable of simultaneously testing multiple technologies and operator networks. We are delighted that our industry leading 5G scanning receivers including our flagship Gflex® will be paired with Infovista’s software solutions. Together we’re bringing the power of two customer-focused teams to co-develop joint 5G testing use cases that solve tangible challenges facing our customers today and in the future.”

PCTEL designs, develops and manufactures industrial-grade products that enable customers to deliver wireless connectivity. PCTEL scanning receivers are precision network testing tools, designed for drive testing, walk testing, troubleshooting, and monitoring of cellular, WiFi, IoT, and critical communications networks worldwide.

Infovista’s TEMS Network Testing Portfolio enables network and services performance quality evaluation, troubleshooting and optimization by measuring and benchmarking end user experience. For Network Operators and Regulators, TEMS delivers the ability to walk test, drive test, and dynamically analyze service performance under real-life conditions — indoors, outdoors, and around the clock. For more on the Infovista TEMS network testing portfolio, please visit https://www.infovista.com/tems

5G, News

Infovista launches Precision Drive Testing™ to automate 5G testing

Cloud-native automation of testing routines integrates data from across 5G network lifecycle to increase speed and accuracy

Paris, France – April 12th, 2022 – Infovista, the global leader in network lifecycle automation (NLA), today announced Precision Drive Testing™ to bring a ML/AI data-driven approach and automation to network testing, significantly reducing the cost and time of 5G network testing. The patent-pending Precision Drive Testing leverages 5G network, service and customer data, and ML/AI techniques to increase the speed and accuracy of 5G testing process.

“There’s a misconception that 5G makes drive testing redundant, but the reality is that although enhanced from LTE, the ‘minimization of drive testing’ feature in 5G still only works if users are in the geographic area that needs testing. Drive testing will still be needed to complement the gaps of MDT in testing, at least until 5G is in fully autonomous,” said Dr. Irina Cotanis, Technology Director, Network Testing at Infovista. “But such is the complexity of 5G networks and the proliferation of device types that traditional drive testing processes are not fit-for-purpose. Operators can’t afford for their highly qualified RF engineers to be driving around manually testing; it’s time to automate and make the cloud do the heavy lifting. Precision Drive Testing transforms the drive testing process from being engineering driven to AI/ML data driven, from manual to autonomous and from something very few can do to something that can be done by anyone.”

Infovista’s cloud-based Precision Drive Testing solution automates and guides testing triggered by use cases based on information and/or analytics results from network planning and performance, fault and configuration management, services assurance, and customers’ (or Crowdsource) data, which an operator will use to inform and improve the network lifecycle processes. Results are instantly available as actionable insights to be used by the requesting systems/solutions, creating a closed-loop of automated and guided testing. This reduces testing time and effort and improves the accuracy of service-specific testing KPIs.

When triggered, the Precision Drive Testing use cases automatically calculate the best test route, generate test scripts to run along with their Definition of Done criteria, the correspondent KPIs log masks and context sensitive criteria. The automatic calculation of sweet spots and drive routes, coupled with directions to the tester including error handling and Edge Analytics, improve the speed and accuracy of the testing processes. Finally, real time reporting and data feed of the expected result ensures that testing data is quickly acted up and in turn used to inform network/service/customer data source based on which the drive has been triggered.

Use cases that can trigger Precision Drive Testing across the 5G network lifecycle include, but are not limited to:

  • Automated Single Site Verification (SSV) – Powered by Precision Drive Testing, the Infovista Automated SSV solution directs lay people using commercially available smartphones to conduct tests in the field, leaving valuable engineering expertise free to focus on high value network optimization tasks. Site testing routines and criteria are defined at the backend and key measurements are autonomously evaluated against pre-defined thresholds rather than manually by a field engineer. This reduces errors in data collection and accelerates the time to Definition of Done status in network-wide testing processes
  • Fine tuning 5G planning propagation models – The solution identifies when the 5G propagation model is likely to be less accurate due to varying external factors, for example in areas of known building construction, fast growing trees, or in extreme and challenging locations such as quarries and container ports where the landscape changes frequently. Precision Drive Testing enables to get actual live data that then can improve the model and accelerate the planning of public and private 5G networks
  • Network Acceptance Automation – ‘Site acceptance’ routines in multiple conditions have a challenge using real traffic with enough samples, particularly in greenfield networks. This means if a problem occurs when real traffic starts running, it can be a time-consuming and costly process to identify the underlying problem. In triggering Precision Drive Test, the algorithms identifies the sweet spot for testing the live network, define the testing routine, direct the tester to the site and automatically conduct the tests. This reduces the time and cost of 5G network acceptance through automated and highly specific testing processes
  • Geolocated troubleshooting – Deeper and more advanced assurance can detect problems and prompt Root Cause Analysis for troubleshooting. But if the problem still exists, it can then trigger a Precision Drive Test to get precise fine-grained geolocated data to help solve issue such as ‘Inter-vendor Ping Pong Handover’ that have been detected by the assurance system
  • Proactive network health monitoring – Monitoring a network to ensure delivery of the end-user experience, for example for a network’s top 10 VIPs, can be a labour intensive and unforgiving process. The software can identify and define drive testing routes, such as a VIP’s commute, and trigger Precision Drive Testing to test degradations/problems on the routes and proactively automate regular quarterly drive tests
  • Assurance of Critical Networks – The growth in private networks, and in the future 5G network slices, will see more widespread deployment of uRLLC-based services such as remote control of mining equipment or drone surveillance of utilities’ critical national infrastructure. These critical networks require predictive SLA management. Assurance software can trigger a Precision Drive Test to proactively test critical networks, with assurance processes in turn improved and optimized through the input of live network test data

Infovista’s TEMS Network Testing Portfolio enables network and services performance quality evaluation, troubleshooting and optimization by measuring and benchmarking end user experience. For Network Operators and Regulators, TEMS delivers the ability to walk test, drive test, and dynamically analyze network and services performance under real-life conditions—indoors, outdoors, and around the clock. For more on the Infovista TEMS network testing portfolio, please visit https://www.infovista.com/tems

For more detail on Precision Drive Testing, please read our new blog https://www.infovista.com/blog/how-to-automate-5g-drive-testing.