Regulated field work
Raceday software for racing regulators
Vets and stewards identify animals, record samples and file reports on the racecourse, with or without a signal.
- Years
- 2014 to now
- Platforms
- iOS, moving to cross-platform
- Role
- Long-running development partner to Event Log, working in its team and leading two of the national deployments.
The brief
Regulators in the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and the US need one dependable record of what happened to each animal on raceday. The people collecting it are standing in a stable yard, wearing gloves, often with poor reception, and the records have to hold up later.
Where it stands
The platform has been in continuous development for twelve years, and new regulators are still being added to it.
The hard parts
- Offline-first storage with upload queues and background sync, so nothing is lost when the signal drops.
- A pluggable scanner layer covering Grabba, AllFlex and SwissPlus microchip readers over ExternalAccessory and Bluetooth.
- Chain of custody for samples, with signatures, inspections and injury reporting.
- Encrypted local storage on the deployments that need it.
Objective-C · Swift · Core Data · CoreBluetooth · SQLCipher
Two deployments up close
2022 to now
HIWU
An app for the Horseracing Integrity and Welfare Unit in the US, used to submit test reports from the field. It covers blood, urine and hair sampling, race rosters, chain of custody, signed affidavits and double-blind testing, with injury and fatality reporting added as the programme has grown.
2020 to now
IGB Retirement
Built for the Irish Greyhound Board and now on the App Store as RCÉTS, its traceability system. Owners record the key events in a greyhound's life after racing: retirement, sale or export, change of location, loss or theft, and death, along with health checks, medicines, vaccines and treatments.