However, the timing is not great.  Anyone following smart meter deployment will have noticed a distinct slowdown over the past few years.  Some of the larger US utilities have already rolled out smart meters, helped by $83 billion of stimulus funding.  A significant chunk of Australia has them as well.  But as stimulus funds have dried up, so have the bulk of smart meter deployments.

The one remaining gung-ho project was the UK one, where previous ministers had been keen to pull it forward.  A lot of the rest of the world, particularly other countries within Europe, who are working out how to address the EC directive on smart metering, have been waiting and watching to see how we’re doing.  On the surface it’s looked good.  Underneath there are conflicting interests which have been building up delays.  Unfortunately the timing of today’s announcement plays to quite a lot of those underlying politics, which could further derail the future of the program.

It’s never been clear to me why the UK needs such a complex deployment.  The fundamentals are sound – it helps to produce accurate bills, provides insight to help utilities manage their business (if they ever work out how to use it), and the decision to provide consumers with In-Home Displays should help educate them and reduce consumption.  But that could all have been delivered at lower cost with the type of meters and energy monitors which were available six years ago.  Instead, the UK has developed a complex variant of the ZigBee 1.0 Smart Energy Profile to add prepay, support for vastly complex tariffs and historic data storage, which has taken years of development and is still very much a work in progress.  All of which is making our meters much more expensive, and pushing their delivery dates out into the future.

Behind the meters, DECC has constructed a body responsible for connecting all of these meters, collecting readings and then passing them on to the relevant owner.  It’s called the DCC – the Data and Communications  Company.  Once formed, this will award contracts to CSPs – Communication Service Providers, to implement the actual connections to the meters, as well as providing interchangeable comms hubs for each meter.  The argument for all of this is that it allows consumers to switch supplier easily.  It’s a massive IT project of the kind that Governments love, because it make it look as if they can specify complex IT, and which suppliers equally love, because they know that Governments will get the specification wrong, leading to blank cheques being written before the inevitable cancellation at some point in the distant future.

No other country has felt the need to do this, but then Britain didn’t get to be where it is today without a long history of screwing up major IT contracts.  Because of the complexity of the DCC and CSP operations, we’ve been through interminable rounds of negotiation as bidding suppliers try to decrease the requirements laid upon them, allowing them to make a bigger profit, along with a “get out of jail free” card for when it inevitably goes pear-shaped.

That’s a large part of the reason for the delay.  But it’s not the only one.  The complexity of the meter specification has ballooned, with those involved playing the old specmanship game of seeing who can piss highest up the wall.  In an industry which is not used to wireless protocols or interoperability, they have yet to learn that simple is best.  Instead they’ve concentrated on turning meters into complex computing devices rather than just connected meters.

You can put part of that down to an industry that is suffering the pains of having technology thrust upon it.  There is no doubt that much of it has been mugged by technology providers and consultants.  But it’s probably also a reaction to low cost smart meters coming from China.  A complex, moveable specification acts as an effective trade barrier, which is why industry players will spend time and money developing it.  But it also contributes to today’s slippage.

These delays and changes don’t play to the business model of utilities.  They’re very risk averse and one thing they hate is spending money which might be wasted.  One of the worst wastes in their eyes is that of stranded assets – deploying a meter or another piece of equipment which needs to be changed or replaced within its working life.  When they put a meter on your wall, they’d prefer to leave it there for 25 years or more.  (My gas meter, which was replaced a few years ago, had been on the wall for 59 years.)  They’re scared stiff that these new-fangled meters might not last fifteen years.  Even worse, an early deployment of smart meters might need replacing in five.  Faced with that concern, they’d rather not deploy anything.

The purpose of the initial Foundation stage of the UK deployment was to let utilities start deploying meters so that they could learn from that experience.  Learn about the issues of installing connected devices, about commissioning the wireless comms, about remotely managing them and about coping with the volume of data pouring into the backend, without having the complexity of the DCC being in the equation for this phase.   But with a spec in flux and a constant desire to add complexity to the system, all that most of them could see was the spectre of stranded assets.  So there has been an underlying pressure to delay.  That has fed a vicious circle of equipment vendors trying to outspec each other in the hope of winning contracts.

Part of the Government announcement today was an attempt to reassure the UK utilities that they need not worry.  There’s a clause in the document that would allow the Foundation meters, which confirm to the earlier SMETS1 specification, to be retrospectively connected to the DCC.  However, it places this responsibility of providing a future backwards compatibility on the DCC and it’s not clear that anyone trusts them to deliver that level of interoperability.  So the statement today, whilst appearing well-meaning, may have the opposite effect.

What the Government does not understand is the potential consequences of having let this happen at this stage.  There are two risks, both emanating from the larger political games being played within elements of the industry.

The first is a local one.  The GB metering specification uses ZigBee Smart Energy Profile (SEP) version 1.x for the smart metering network within the home.  It currently operates at 2.4 GHz, as it does everywhere else in the world.  However, in the UK we have a lot of buildings with thick walls, and a fair proportion of high rise flats, neither of which allow 2.4G Hz to propagate from meter to in-home display.  That’s not a great issue in other countries, as they don’t give every consumer a free in-home displays.  Because we do in the UK, and had to include the energy savings they’ll allegedly deliver to justify the cost benefit of smart meters in the first place, it means that around 30% of homes need another wireless solution if their in-home display is going to work.  Otherwise the economic justification for the deployment falls over.

The current approach to that is to develop a new version of the ZigBee standard which operates at 868MHz.  It’s technically possible, but writing wireless standards takes time.  There was no hope that it would be ready for the original mass rollout in 2014.  Nor will it be ready for the new date of 2015.  But it might just be in 2016.  If utilities start their roll-out in 2015, as currently planned, then they will need to start with 2.4 GHz meters.  They’ll then need to move to dual-band 2.4 GHz / 868 MHz meters and comms hubs from 2016 to provide backwards interoperability.  Which, for their business model, argues that they should delay any roll-outs until 2016 so that they only need to supply 868 MHz equipment.  The problem is that if the new standard is delayed, as it inevitably will be, nothing will get deployed until 2017 or later. However, as long as they believe their vendor’s PR, which says 868 MHz development will be trivially easy, then any delay to the program now makes that option of waiting for 868 MHz look very attractive to a utility.

The other problem is that most of the rest of the world is moving to a different version of the ZigBee Smart Energy Profile, called SEP2.0, which runs over IP.   The UK Government chose not to adopt it, because they initially planned to start deploying meters in 2012, which was well in advance of when SEP2.0 would be complete.  However, last week the ZigBee Alliance announced that the SEP2.0 standard had been released.  It means that meter vendors around the world will be turning their development teams towards products that use SEP2.0.  The longer that the UK delays, the greater the pressure will be for it to migrate its specification to SEP2.0.  As SEP2.0 is incompatible with SEP1.x, any SEP1.x products deployed ahead of that change would be stranded assets.  Which again suggests to utilities that they should sit and wait.  And it’s an industry which is exceedingly good at doing that.

And while the UK prevaricates, so will the rest of the world.  The UK deployment was probably the most high profile deployment, not least because it was going to demonstrate that complexity could be managed.  The larger vision of the program also resulted in the formation of a number of innovative start-ups developing in-home displays and home energy management products.  They are now at risk of going bust if there is a twelve month hiatus in orders.  Even larger players will start to look at the value of continuing investment to support the program as they see any revenue potential disappearing into the distance.

It’s not the death of smart metering, but it will be a shock that will reverberate far beyond the UK.  If the UK is going to claw back its reputation as a pioneer, it may need to radically reassess how it is going to deliver smart metering.  The smart metering and consumer engagement landscape is changing.  Any delay may mean that existing meter and engagement designs may look obsolete by the time that they come to be deployed.  So rather than being a breathing space, this may be better interpreted as a call for Government and industry to reflect on their fundamental ideas.

What is an Appcessory?  Think of a cuddly toy for your three year old which interacts with the story on her tablet.  Think of the stylus you use for sketching on your iPad, where squeezing it changes the thickness or colour of the lines you’re painting.  Or a motor and rudder you clip on a paper plane which lets you control its flight by tipping your smartphone from side to side.  LED lights that come on when you enter the room, which you can program the colour of, or which even sense your mood from the way you’re walking.  Armbands that know you’re about to point at the TV and tell it to change channel before you even move your finger.  Clothes that tell you they need washing.  Many things that until recently were the preserve of science fiction, but are about to become possible and eminently affordable.

The rapid potential growth of Appcessories comes from the fact that phone owners will connect more than one, and hopefully many of them to their phones or tablets.  That concept was first put forward by Nokia in 2001, when they postulated that the world could evolve to have a web of a billion phones and a trillion connected devices.  That prediction was part of a technical proposal to the IEEE, who rejected it in favour of playing with mesh in the wireless wastes of ZigBee.  But Nokia’s idea re-emerged six years later in the form of Wibree, and a further six years on in its most recent incarnation as Bluetooth Smart (the standard formerly known as Bluetooth low energy), it has been built into over a quarter of a million smartphones and tablets.  By the end of 2013 it will be in a further half billion of them.  By 2020 the world will have over 6 billion Bluetooth Smart Phones and tablets.

That’s the foundation for this incredible growth.  It’s an evolution where the things we carry with us start connecting to the things we have around us. One of the best descriptions I’ve come across of an Appcessory is “The Internet of My Things”.  They’re devices which connect to an App on your phone or tablet, allowing you to interact with both.  They may connect to the web and be part of the Internet of Things, but they don’t need to.  Instead they provide the irresistible prospect of a new and captivating experience, where the fun of a phone app can be extended to something you can throw, hold, measure, cuddle or wear.  Appcessories are probably the most diverse technology market we have ever seen, but they are set to succeed because they’re fun, they’re useful and in a very short time they will be cheap.

As the report explains, all of the pieces needed to start this market have fallen into place.  Companies are already selling these products, starting to build the excitement.  There are certainly risks to its growth as many of these companies are new and will have issues with scaling up as volumes rise.  But it’s a market which is of great interest to larger players.  Analysts like Bloomberg already believe that the smartphone market is beginning to plateau.  Although volumes will grow, the global phone market is reaching saturation at its current $358 billion.   In terms of revenue, we’re close to Peak Phone, which means manufacturers need to find other areas of growth.  Appcessories offer a new product stream, adding an estimated $130 billion by 2020.  They also open up potential for other verticals which have struggled to take off, particularly personal health and smart homes.

This year we are already seeing fantastic levels of innovation.  In 2014 we’ll see the start of growth as larger players stake their claims and bring the efficiency of their supply chains.  The hardware tools are coming, with low cost development tools allowing anyone to innovate.  If the major smartphone and tablet vendors grasp the opportunity, producing stable platforms and development tools, then the sky’s the limit.

The Blue Button is a good idea.  It’s a scheme, pioneered by the VHA, to let patients download their medical records in a standard format, so that they can be shared with doctors, hospitals, emergency responders and other caregivers.  It lets patients add personal and insurance information and supports a host of detailed medical data.  When it was launched it was with the expectation that it would “improve the quality of patient-clinician interactions”.  Over one million members of the VHA now use it, and it’s being adopted by other healthcare organisations in the US because of its success in improving that interaction.

The rather naive hope was that Green Button would do the same for energy, but the analogy quickly breaks down.  Whereas most healthcare workers see helping patients as an integral part of their contract, most utilities don’t.  Trying to claim any analogy between the Blue Button and the Green Button is really just a bit of sly marketing to try and disguise the fact that most utilities only want to work with their customers if it’s for their own benefit.  Utilities don’t sign a Hippocratic oath.  The only oaths they utter are those against regulators, the fuel poor, late payers and air conditioning users who don’t sign up to demand response programs.

The reason that Blue Button worked is that it lets patients and doctors share data for their mutual benefit.  That not only results in making a lot of medical data more understandable to all of those involved in the healthcare process, but it helps break down the barriers between patient and clinician.  And despite the industry obsession with treatment for its own sake (see Shannon Brownlee’s Overtreated for a good description of that), healthcare is increasingly being seen as a two-way process where the patient is no longer just the object of treatment, but an informed consumer.

The same is not true of most utilities.  In many consumer’s minds, Tom Lehrer could have been thinking about them when he penned his Masochism Tango:

Bash in my brain,
And make me scream with pain,
Then kick me once again,
And say we’ll never part.

In survey after survey, consumers rate utilities as the least trusted companies they deal with.  And that lack of trust extends to attempts by those utilities to provide energy saving messages.  A recent report from the Shelton Group described the prevailing consumer attitude as one of “learned helplessness” – every time they try to reduce their usage, the costs still go up.  Hence they disengage.

From a utility viewpoint, the Green Button is a quick and relatively easy way to win favour with regulators and politicians.  It doesn’t require them to do much more than release a minimum amount of smart metering data to a customer via their website.  Which makes it a tick box requirement that they can place on their billing system suppliers.  After that it’s up to the consumer to go out and find a third party service to make some sense of the data.

Here’s where we see the real difference between the Blue and Green Button propositions.  Blue Button users can access information for emergency contacts, health care teams and insurance providers, details about over-the-counter medications, allergies, military health history, medical events and lab tests, all of the daily records in their diet and physical activity (exercise) journals, and a full history of recorded vital signs readings, e.g. blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol, heart rate, body temperature, weight and pain level.  All of which is useful information to help them manage their healthcare program.  In contrast, the level of information that comes out of the Green Button is generally no more than fifteen or thirty minute energy consumption data and its cost.

As Green Button users are finding, that’s of rather limited use.  It’s nowhere near granular enough to let them understand the consumption of individual appliances, where users need real time data every few seconds.  (Which is why the UK is mandating the use of In Home Displays and meters that can provide that level of data.)  It can provide gross consumption information about heavy use appliances, such as pool pumps and air conditioning, which lets utilities demonstrate to users the cost of peak usage.  But that’s turning the model around – it’s now about utilities using Green Button to help reinforce the stick of draconian peak pricing schemes.  Which turns Green Button into a stalking horse, not an advance in consumer-engagement.

It’s all a long way away from the Blue Button vision of “improving the quality of patient-clinician interactions”.  I suspect that if Green Button data were to significantly increase the level of consumer-utility interactions by persuading large numbers of users to phone up their support desks to try and engage in positive conversations about how they could reduce their bills, the utilities would drop Green Button like a hot potato.  It’s only whilst it serves as a low cost piece of consumer-centric PR that it’s of value to them.

That’s not to say it has no future.  Although the granularity of data makes it difficult to derive much value from it as it stands, companies that have a large database of detailed energy use data may be able to infer far more valuable insight – that’s something that companies like Onzo are doing.  And there is no reason why utilities should not be able to provide more granular data, as many smart meters can support that.  But it would mean upgrading their IT infrastructure, which most are loath to do.

Until either of these happen, Green Button will be little more than a PR gesture, allowing utilities and US senators to look smug while the smart grid burns.  There will be a plethora of apps for the touchy-feely phablet community, but not much to help persuade the majority of customers to better manage their energy use.  Although the offering from Forgitit is interesting.  For an annual fee of $30 they track your usage, work out if you could save money by switching energy supplier and if so, switch you to the most cost effective utility.  It’s only going to work in deregulated markets, but it’s the sort of disruptive approach that the market needs.  And one which I suspect none of the Green Button advocates thought about when they jumped on the bandwagon, as it’s a model that lets consumers actively disengage by placing their choices in the hands of a third party with no utility loyalty.  I hope it does well – we need more of that kind of disruptive thinking if we’re ever going to change the way consumers view energy.

That mantra has seen a raft of new companies appear in each sector, directly targeting the public with products that attempt to change consumer behaviour or lock them into a brand.  In the mHealth sector most have realised that medical or clinical approaches are too difficult, so have euphemistically renamed exercise and dieting as health and fitness.  Meanwhile, energy utilities are attempting to improve their image by rolling out customer engagement programs, whether that’s in the form of green button apps in the US, or in home energy displays in the UK.  Both hope that this will result in customer loyalty for their brand, attracting new customers and retaining existing ones.

In recent months both sectors have latched onto gamification, often as a result of hiring strategic marketing people from web and mobile phone companies.  They’ve taken to gamification like enthusiastic bricks to water, hoping it will change the way consumers value their products and buy from them.  I think they’re sadly mistaken.  As proof, I’d cite the success of Viggle, which illustrates exactly what the average consumer wants from gamification.  Viggle let’s you win points by watching TV.  It’s nothing to do with better health or savings on your energy bill – it’s the couch potato dream of free pizza for mindless inactivity.

The genesis of much of what’s going on can be traced back to loyalty schemes in the retail sector.  Retail loyalty schemes aren’t new.  In our grandparents’ day there were co-operative stores which offered a divvy (dividend) for regular customers, either through savings books or trading stamps.  Later on, companies like Green Shield expanded that principle to multiple participating stores, allowing shoppers to earn points on purchases by collecting stamps which they could exchange for gifts.  That in turn has evolved into credit card cashbacks and cross store loyalty cards like Nectar.  They are all basically loyalty schemes that reward you for going back to the same store.  Traditionally these loyalty schemes weren’t data driven; they simply made a record of how much money you’d spent and rewarded you accordingly.

The best known example outside retail chains is Air Miles, which was launched in the UK in 1988 and has been emulated by virtually every airline. Most of these schemes are aimed at regular flyers, trying to make sure you suppress your preferences about when or possibly where you fly in order to accumulate miles that give you free flights, gifts or upgrades.  They’ve been remarkably successful, not least in keeping their customers away from experiencing what may be higher service levels on a rival airline. It fascinates me that even the most reviled of budget airlines now run loyalty schemes, which still appear to attract customers.

None of these schemes make much use of the data they collect, other than totting up points to award prizes.  Hence their value to the companies using them is predominantly one of retaining essentially faceless customers.

The shift to extracting value from the data happened when a small start-up called Dunnhumby approached Tesco in 1994 with a proposal to change the way they used their customer information.  The story has been told many times, but consisted of Dunnhumby applying data analysis techniques to understand just what Tesco’s customers were buying.  Their success in doing this led to Tesco’s ClubCard loyalty scheme, still seen as the benchmark for any such retail loyalty offering, and the famous quote by Tesco’s chairman, Lord MacLaurin that “What scares me about this is that you know more about my customers after three months than I know after 30 years”.  Ironically, Tesco has been one of the major supporters of Green Shield stamps ten years before, but had dropped them because of the cost.

Dunnhumby has grown and now supports many other clients and its alumni have founded competing companies to engage more segments of the retail sector.  Their proposition is more than just loyalty.  It uses data to understand what we buy and when we buy it, and entices us to do more of the same through segmentation and personal offers.  It’s a trick that most other retailers have attempted to emulate, with varying degrees of success.  Whilst they may have been successful in the old fashioned loyalty stakes, it’s far from clear whether any of them have achieved the data analysis and business transformation gains that Tesco has made.  However, a lot of that comes down to an understanding of using data for generating new insight, rather than merely for reporting and asset tracking.  That’s a common failing of many who are embracing the new buzzword of Big Data, who do not have the insight themselves to realise that it offers something fundamentally new, not just bigger Excel spreadsheets.  (The few that do understand this already consider Big to be a passé adjective, having embraced the infinitely more interesting subject of Broad Data.)

Whilst most company’s aspirations stop at loyalty – many would be delirious to achieve even that, the new kid on the block is gamification.  Gamification is an attempt to meld together the old world of loyalty with the new world of Apps.  Apps pose a problem to many traditional companies, as does the whole concept of social media.  They see their customers consuming apps and want to be a part of that, preferably putting their brand onto this new, more intimate, fourth screen.  Many lost a lot of money in commissioning largely trivial apps that had little effect.  But as Apps evolved, it became apparent that consumers were using them in a somewhat unexpected way.  Games were being taken up by new demographics, not least by women, who now account for over half of the revenue for some mobile games.  And a new industry of health and fitness devices, whose very existence depends on making self-sacrifice compelling were digging into the behavioural research of people like Robert Cialdini to keep their target users counting the calories and walking the walk.  All of a sudden the potential was there to try and expand this concept into other everyday tasks to help reinforce brand loyalty.

So we see industries from hotel chains to utilities, health clubs to publishers trying to jump on the bandwagon.  The greatest, yet most fanciful conviction about its potential contribution appears to come from energy companies and healthcare start-ups, who respectively believe that we care about saving money and getting fit.  In thinking this, they delude themselves about the reasons behind gamification’s success, which also turn out to be its Achilles Heel.  Which is that it’s only fun if it’s fun.  To be explicit, for most people, games are about winning something.  And an important motivator is having the chance of winning something that you didn’t expect to win and winning it now.

That’s why it’s so difficult to use gamification to reinforce a brand or build up loyalty for the general public.  I don’t dispute its success in health and fitness for a small section of the population, but I’d maintain that it is and will probably only ever be a small section.  I have friends who use fitness apps to compete against each other, whether that’s in cycling, jogging or losing weight.  But without exception, these are people who always competed or who have addictive personalities, and frequently both. The most passionate ones are those who are giving up one addiction, such as smoking, for another, which may be their pedometer.  But they’re a limited set of people.

It’s why I’d claim that gamification will never work for things like changing energy use behaviour or losing weight for the vast majority of the population.  Neither give the instant reward that’s so important to the gamer.  Switching off a light won’t have an effect on what you pay for at least a month or more.  Nor is the final saving compelling enough. It might give better odds than buying a lottery ticket, but part of the compulsion of games is not just the ratio of the reward to the effort, but its immediacy.  Unlike most games playing, switching off the lights is not fun at the time – it’s doing something mundane for the promise of a longer term good.

Which is why Viggle hits so many buttons.  It rewards you with points for watching TV.  You know what you’re going to win.  You can see your score racking up relatively quickly as there are achievable targets.  And the reward isn’t worthy and boring – it’s a pizza.  Gamification doesn’t get much better than that.  Moreover it fulfils the second important imperative for any successful gamification app, which is that it generates data for the provider which can be processed and sold, funding the service for its provider. That’s very important, as someone needs to pay for the on-going service with the IT infrastructure costs behind it, which is something that appears to be missing in all of the more worthy gamification plays.

The conclusion is that any energy company pursuing gamification is probably pouring money down the drain.  For it to work, they need to find a persuasive marriage of action and short term reward, like watching TV and getting free pizza.  And whilst a lot of people might be able to propose something they’d like to happen when they turn the lights out, I suspect we’re a long way from any utility daring to offer that as an incentive to save energy.

It suggests that either our ministers in the Department of Health are doing a Chris Huhne, or else the analysts are being uncharacteristically understated about the future.

You always need to be careful when politicians quote large numbers.  Most aren’t particularly numerate, having come from non-scientific backgrounds, so whenever they see or hear the word “million” they tend to think it’s big and important.  Once they believe it is big and important, they stop thinking about what it means or its context, because to their innumerate level of understanding big and important doesn’t need any qualification – it’s just big and important.   As a result they tend not to ask what the number actually means or whether it might be achievable.

Analysts also know that the word “million” is big and important, because it persuades people to buy their reports.  Companies buy these reports in order to justify otherwise dubious business plans when they’re seeking new investment. And when that investment materialises, the analysts see that as justification for their predictions and increase the numbers in next year’s report.  Until at some point belief turns into reality, the bubble bursts, or everyone agrees on a new name for the technology and starts again.  However, in this case, the discrepancy between the two sets of million-mongers is sufficiently large to justify some further investigation.

Let’s start with the three million.  That’s the headline of the 3 million lives initiative.  It was announced in January 2012 by Paul Burstow – Minster of State for Care Services.  Following on from the positive results that had recently been reported from the Whole System Demonstrator (WSD) programme, which “proved” that telehealth could deliver a 15% reduction in bed days and a 8% reduction in tariff costs, the Department of Health, along with four industry groups issued a concordat which stated an aim of deploying telecare to three million patients by 2017.

The partnership between the Department of Health, the telehealth and telecare industries is a commitment to “move beyond the current situation where a few thousand people are benefitting from telehealth to one where millions of lives can be improved with the help of these technology assisted services, and contribute to the mainstreaming of telecare”.  It acknowledges that it is “an ambitious plan to bring the benefits of telehealth and telecare technologies to three million people with long term conditions and social care needs over the next five years”.  This means getting telehealth to around 5% of the UK population by 2017.

You can’t knock that vision.  Telehealth has been blighted by the difficulty of moving to scale.  In the light of that three million goal, the WSD trial looks insignificant at just 6,000 patients – we need around five hundred more of those to hit the three million.  We shouldn’t forget that the WSD remains one of the largest organised trials anywhere in the world.  The next step along the way is the DALLAS program, which has the aim of enrolling 50,000 patients.  It plans to achieve that by shifting the balance of funding from multiple, academic-led trials to placing real products into the field (Deploy Assisted Living, Limit Academic Spending).  There are some very sensible reasons for doing this, not least of which is to understand what to do with the data that is produced by all of these telehealth and telecare systems.  Three million connected patients will generate a lot of data.  Not only does that need to be analysed to turn it into something useful, but systems also need to be put in place that are capable of managing ten million or more remote devices (most patients will have more than one monitoring sensor).  Right now, the industry has almost no experience about doing this at scale.

It seems that the 3 million lives initiative is making progress.  In November 2012 Jeremy Hunt launched the latest NHS mandate alongside which he claimed that seven pathfinders – NHS and local authority associations, were about to agree contracts with industry suppliers that would each allow 100,000 patients to benefit from telehealth during the course of the coming year, making the UK a global leader.

They’re brave words, but they’re already beginning to sound a little hollow.  Telecare Aware has been charting the progress of the initiative and it’s worth reading it.  Like all of us, they want it to be a success, but to achieve that needs more than optimistic words.  In an excellent article earlier this month on the pathfinders losing their way, Lis Evenstad of eHealth Insider interviewed Chris Wright – the programme manager of 3millionlives. He admitted that the target of 10,000 patients for each pathfinder was “more of an estimate”, and that they were only looking for a commitment, such as a contract signed, rather than actual deployments.  Which makes the prospect of three million users in 2017 look rather remote.

Which brings me back to the InMedica figures.  They’re suggesting that by 2017 the global number of telehealth users will be 1.8 million, quite a lot shy of the three million that are being predicted for the UK.  One reason for this headline discrepancy could be differing definitions of what is meant by Telehealth.  InMedica have made clear where their 1.8 million figure comes from.  They’re tracking Congestive Heart Failure (CHF), Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disorder (COPD), diabetes, hypertension and mental health conditions.  They estimate that in the US today, telehealth solutions are being used by 140,000 post-acute patients who have been discharged from hospital and a further 80,000 signed up to ambulatory monitoring.  They don’t expect that mix to change dramatically, although diabetes and COPD will account for growing percentages.

The 3millionlives website defines telehealth as “services that use various point-of-care technologies to monitor a patient’s physiological status and health conditions. When combined with personalised health education within a chronic disease management programme, it can significantly improve an individual’s health and quality of life. Typically, it involves electronic sensors or equipment that monitors vital health signs remotely from home or while on the move. Readings are automatically transmitted to an appropriately trained person who can monitor the health vital signs and make decisions about potential interventions in real time, without the patient needing to attend a clinic”.

That’s not that different from InMedica’s criteria.  On the surface it doesn’t seem to include telecare.  The UK can make a good claim to be the global leader in telecare, if only because of the number of fall alarms which have been deployed.  I was told a few years ago that over 1 million people in the UK have been provided with them, accounting for around 60% of the global total.  That’s down to some excellent coordination between local authorities and suppliers.  Sadly only around 30% are thought to be worn.  By 2017 there’s a fair chance that the total number that will have been supplied could be 1.5 million, which could give us half of the 3millionlives total.  After all, a recent report reckons the global market for wearable devices for seniors will reach 37 million by 2017.  But it’s not clear whether 3million lives does include these is its total.  That may change…

Otherwise, where do the patients come from?  There’s the excellent Digital First initiative, which I sure could be redefined to provide some of the extra numbers, but it’s not really telehealth.  And the lack of updates to their website makes me worry that it’s another good idea that is being buried.

There is no doubt that if the demand is there, device manufacturers can fulfil it.  ABI research recently reported strong growth in wearable mHealth devices (which they see predominantly as pedometers and heart rate belts), claiming that shipments of devices grew to 30 million last year, and is likely to exceed 150 million by 2017.  However, that assumes that 150 million people will be interested enough to use them, which is the common limiting factor that is likely to plague the 3 million lives initiative.

The point is that counting devices, or the ability of the industry to manufacture them isn’t very useful.  The real barrier is not the technology – we have that.  It’s not even getting the data.  It’s how we integrate both of them into medial pathways.  Theo Ahadome, a senior analyst at InMedica summed it up recently “The issue of whether telehealth works to drive clinical and economic results has become a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ question for healthcare providers.  In fact, the real answer is ‘it depends.’  It depends on how the telehealth system, and services are set up and how the behaviour of patient and other stakeholders can be changed in this system.”

They are wide words.  To see why in practice, we need to turn to two recent reports on real deployments.  The first is The Commonwealth Fund’s Case Studies in Telehealth Adoption.  This looks at three US deployments and points out some early lessons, key of which are:

• Telehealth-enabled programs disrupt the status quo. Telehealth requires a different mind-set to achieve desired changes in practice and targeted outcomes. An organization’s ability to promote a culture of openness, preparedness, and adaptive­ness to technology-led change will increase the likelihood that the implementation will succeed.
• Program development involves a multidis­ciplinary, team-based approach. Telehealth requires the integration of technical, clinical, and business processes into a standard program. Telehealth programs tend to specialize in providing the technology expertise, wraparound support and training, and equipment installation, while home care and other care partners provide the clinical expertise for successfully designing and imple­menting the technology for use in care.
• Technology implementation is a social process. Technology-enabled solutions in health care are very much social in nature. Establishing leadership support and identifying program champions are the core foundations for a successful program, while patient activation and engagement have been key to successful program outcomes.

None of these are just about signing contracts.  They are all about changing culture.  If you need that spelt out, then have a look at the Project Evaluation Report of the Yorkshire & the Humber Telehealth Hub, which should be required reading for anyone involved in telehealth.  This provides the experience of their work to set up a telehealth hub.  I’m only going to list some of the key points they raise.  They’re the same ones that come up again and again, but particularly cogently put in this report:

• Organisations seemed reluctant to try the services offered, even when they were free of charge of heavily subsidised.
• Telehealth was far down the list of priorities of newly formed CCGs.
• Barely anyone said yes quickly.
• Currently there is no driving imperative to make a health economy implement at scale this technology even though the potential efficiency benefits are extensive and the benefit to patient experience and outcomes positive. Current system levers incentivise Trusts to keep admitting patients, and do not incentivise commissioners to commission services to prevent admissions.
• Time taken to convert interest into contractual commitment, and then from contract to deployment, was more time consuming than anticipated.
• The service was offered to all GPs, but only three chose to take it up.
• One of the partners commented that “When I look at the aims expressed, what strikes me is the “tele” not the condition”.

I was struck by their use of two phrases – the “sceptical GP” and the need to develop a model across the whole organisation, not just the “hobbyist activities of a few“.  Those are my emphases, but I am sure they will be familiar to many.  The fact that these two descriptions still haunt almost every report indicates just how big a challenge reaching the three million will be.

One of their conclusions should be the banner for making 3 million lives happen – “Do not focus on the technology; it is change management that drives adoption of best practice care pathways and methods; adequate technology solutions are necessary but not sufficient.”

The title of this piece is deliberately glib, but there’s a point behind it.  Trying to target numbers is not helpful.  We could deploy 3 million devices quite easily, but most would sit gathering dust or be hidden in the back of drawers.  The concordat recognises that the aim should be about achieving a better quality of life for patients.  That’s not about procurement managers writing contracts for devices, it’s about changing the way we incorporate data into our ways of working.  The two reports above confirm that, based on experience with real deployments from people who actively want telehealth to happen, which is not the norm.

The pathfinders need to understand what they’re trying to achieve and the processes that must be changed to make telehealth work; only then does it make sense to write the supply contracts.  We now have evidence not just of telehealth’s efficacy, but also the way to implement it.  It’s vital that we take note of that, rather than believing that just because it’s big it will automatically happen.

A basic programmable thermostat in the US costs under $20, not the $250 price tag of the Nest.  As such, Nest appeals to those who like buying technology and form rather than function – it’s no surprise that it sells as an accessory in Apple Stores in the US.  It has all of the glamour and pizzazz of Apple products, but with a worrying limitation – it is just hardware – there’s no service model.  In other words, it’s a bit like an iPhone without an App Store.

There is no doubt that it’s a lot easier to use than most conventional thermostats, which seem to be exclusively designed by engineers who failed their user experience courses and want to get their own back on society.  However, there are plenty of alternatives which are cheaper, just as easy to use and which work outside the US.  And there have been for the last few decades.  But these alternatives have historically failed to sell.  That’s changed, but this new generation of connected wireless thermostats has an Achilles’ heel – they need someone to support the web service for their life, which may be ten to twenty years, and I can’t see where that’s been factored in.  So is Nest going to feather the pockets of its VC backers, or make an omelette out of their investments?

When I installed my central heating system some thirty years ago I tried to find a smart thermostat.  At the time I was surprised to find there was a choice.  They weren’t internet connected, but they came with temperature sensors for inside and outside that provided basic learning about the thermal characteristics of the house and they had a decent User Interface.  It was mostly buttons and LEDs, but it worked and was about the same relative price then as a Nest is today.

Five years ago I replaced my boiler (furnace if you’re a US reader) and looked for a current smart thermostat.  To my surprise I couldn’t find one.  When I asked the major manufacturers about them I kept on getting the same story – they’d designed them, taken them to market and they didn’t sell.  I was one of a handful of customers who had ever bought one.  As a result of which they’d all been withdrawn.

Nobody doubts the advantage of having some form of smart heating control in the home.  The controllers or thermostats that are typically installed are set once by the installer and never changed.  Except for the few occasions when it’s really cold and they get turned up, and never turned down again.  Which means that almost every household is wasting money on their heating.

Now we have Internet connectivity, Smartphones and Apps, which should make these devices simpler to use and even more attractive.  And there’s no doubting that the Nest is that.  None of the underlying technology is new, it’s just beautifully packaged and very well executed.  Emerson, Honeywell, Drayton, Schneider and the rest of the industry have been trying and failing to sell smart and connected thermostats for the last ten years. They’ve failed not because of the technology, but mainly because of the channel to market.  These devices are bought and installed by plumbers and heating engineers, who in most cases neither understand them, nor see any advantage in paying $250 for a thermostat when they can buy a simple one for $20 and then add a 500% mark-up.  If a thermostat fails, a householder can either buy a replacement and fit it themselves, or call an electrician who usually does the same marked-up $20 thermostat trick.

In the US, Nest is being successful because it has found a different model and channel to market.  Despite their marketing, they’re not really selling energy savings – they’re selling desirability.  It is a beautifully designed product.  All that consumers need to do to give it a home is unscrew their nasty old thermostat and replace it with a Nest.  Then call their neighbours round and feel smug.

That model works in the US because most heating systems use 24V for their control wiring.  Here in Europe, most switch the live wire at 230V.  Which means that the self-replacement market disappears (or is illegal in many countries), adding an extra $150 of installer cost, which dents the desirability.  But I have a bigger concern about the whole connected thermostat model, which is who maintains and pays for the server?

I don’t think I’m unique in having a different attitude to consumer products and household controls.  Whilst I might change a phone or a laptop every few years (but increasingly only do that if they’re broken), I expect my thermostat or light switch to last for fifteen or twenty years.  Where that’s a connected device allowing me to adjust the heating from my phone, I’m going to expect the service behind it to last for the same fifteen or twenty years.  I think that’s where the connected thermostat vendors are going to have a problem, because that means I’m going to expect their servers to be up and running for those fifteen to twenty years.  Which is something that no-one has done yet.  I’m not going to be content if the thermostat reverts to working in a local mode after a few years when Nest goes bust or gets acquired by someone else, because I’ll have paid for a connected thermostat which I expect to remain connected in perpetuity.   Particularly if it cost me $250.  Nest have already had server outages and their customers are far from pleased.  As one put it earlier this month, “I am being patient but it’s starting to wear thin! For what we paid for these devices they should be able to afford to give them the highest level of support on the back end”.

This is an issue with every new connected device that comes to market – who will keep the servers running?  It’s not so much of a problem for fast moving consumer products, which will get replaced regularly.  But it is very big problem for home infrastructure products like smart thermostats.  To see why, think about the economics.  These devices are claimed to save me around $180 a year.  As a user I’m unlikely to invest in one if it costs more than that $180 and I will feel aggrieved if I have to pay more than $25 a year for an on-going service.  Even that is probably double what most people would be prepared to pay.  I’ll expect that to include updated apps for any phone or tablet I might buy over the next ten years, plus technical support for each of them.   The obvious place to get that from is the thermostat manufacturer, but supporting a ten or twenty year commitment is a big ask, particularly if they’re a start-up.  Not least because just administering all of those subscriptions at that level is a major cost.  And I can’t think of any providers I’ve had a twenty year relationship with, except my bank, who I certainly wouldn’t trust with my heating control.  I switch my mobile provider, my broadband provider, my home insurer and my utility every few years.  So who is going to support my access to a proprietary thermostat over a decade or more?  As I acquire more connected devices that problem will multiply.  It’s a major hole in most Internet of Things business models and probably needs a global aggregator to come along if they’re going to work.  Which may be someone like Google…

A couple of players in the US have tried monthly fees, but none in large enough trials to know whether it works.  And these are very distorted by the local Energy Efficiency rebates that are available to utilities over there.  In Germany, Tado is trying the service fee route, and it will be interesting to see how large a customer base it can attract and retain.  Without service fees, these products are a hardware sale, which carries ongoing support and liabilities, but with no incremental revenue.  Nest has played all of its Apple pedigree cards to get to where it is today.  Hpwever, the market and most of the IP is still owned by the traditional players.  I suspect they’re looking carefully at Nest’s market share.  If Nest doesn’t get mired in problems of ongoing service availability as its market share grows, they’ll be lining up a new set of patent infringements to halt its growth.

It doesn’t help that other large players are reinforcing the “no service fee” model.  Here in the UK, British Gas has entered this market with a controller supplied by AlertMe.  They’re offering installation for £229, with no service fee, claiming it can save up to £140 on heating bills.  After an initial bit of enthusiasm, press coverage has been largely negative, with most coverage claiming that it’s not worth the money.  Despite that, British Gas claim it’s going well, but they have the largest boiler servicing business in the UK, which lets them do some attractive bundles to shift kit.  It should have given them the opportunity to deploy a service fee model.  But they didn’t.  And it’s difficult applying one once you’ve given it away for free.

So the connected thermostat looks set to remain a hardware only play.  Whilst companies like EcoFactor and Tado are quite sensibly trying to monetise the ongoing service, Nest in the US and British Gas in the UK are firmly setting a stake in the ground saying that these are one time hardware purchases.  And for new entrants and Nest’s new investors, that means thinking about how much the ongoing server support will cost for each thermostat over the next twenty years.  I hope that Nest are investing a fair chunk of their $80m to provide that ongoing support, otherwise the ensuing customer dissatisfaction may result in another premature halt to the hopes of smart heating controls.

The  week started off on Monday with newspaper headlines about how much food is wasted every year.  Picking up on a report from the Institute of Mechanical Engineers, the papers covered the fact that around 50% of all food produced ends up as waste.  WRAP, an organisation that works to reduce waste in the UK, reckons that UK consumers throw away around 19% of the 38 million tonnes of food they buy each year.

On Tuesday, we forgot all about food waste, as the media’s attention switched to the fact that small amounts of horse and pig meat had been found in cheap beef burgers from Tesco and other supermarket chains.   

On Wednesday, a helicopter flying along the Thames hit a crane and crashed in flames in the middle of the rush hour.  It narrowly missed a busy commuter station and passing trains, and was only about 200 metres away from crashing into the MI6 building, which would have provided a real-life version of the recent Skyfall.  It was a story straight out of a disaster movie and in any normal week it should have run for days.

But it didn’t.  On Thursday the papers carried full page apologies from Tesco as they pleaded for forgiveness for inadvertently leading the nation into the despicable Gallic culinary habit of eating man’s four legged friend.  But they’d obviously learnt something from Monday headlines.  Rather than sending the perfectly edible burgers to landfill, they had decided to incinerate them, turning food waste into energy.  So far, they’ve disposed of 10 million perfectly edible burgers, which is obscene.  For the UK press the prospect of eating a trace of horse was far more worrying than our secret services going up in smoke.  (Although the Evening Standard should be commended for an article comparing the taste of horse, buffalo, crocodile and camel burgers – the camel won.)

Even the Jewish Chronicle got in on the act, pointing out that kosher burgers were horse free, and forgetting about the problem of 30% pigmeat in the burgers until the penultimate line of their article.  Although their web version of the story has an excellent link to a story about a stray cat in the soup cauldron in the Knesset kitchens.

What this demonstrates is how difficult it is to get a sensible message across to the British public.  Tuesday’s morning papers, before the horsemeat story took hold, were filled with rightly indignant letters from readers condemning the level of food waste.  By Thursday the populace were happy to throw away any meat product that might have ever had a glancing acquaintance with horse DNA.  Although Exotic Meats – an online purveyor of some very tasty animals, did sell out of horsemeat, so there were apparently a few sane individuals left in the country.  If you want to delve into the sorry tale of the horse meat scandal, there’s an excellent infographic from Aldo Baker which explains it.

All of this prompted me to read the WRAP report in more detail than I might otherwise have done.  I’m glad I did, for it contains some very interesting figures.  The first one I’d like to highlight is the total estimated value of food waste in the UK in 2010.  This is food that is bought, taken home and then thrown away, because it’s unwanted, goes rotten or is more than we can eat.  It doesn’t include any wastage elsewhere in the production chain.

In 2010, WRAP estimated that we wasted £11.8 billion of food.  That’s money that we spent on food that we didn’t eat, which averages out to around £420 per household.

The £11.8 billion stuck in my mind, because that’s not very different from the estimated cost of the UK smart metering program, according to the most recent impact assessment.  Although in the case of smart metering, only £4.3 billion of savings accrue to customers – the rest are network and generation benefits.  In other words, the average consumer wastes almost three times as much money on food waste as they do on energy waste.

The next interesting figure was a calculation of the CO2 savings that would be obtained if this excess food were not produced and sold.  WRAP estimated that would be around 17 million tonnes of CO2 based on those 2010 figures.  The Smart Metering Impact Assessment reckons that the full smart metering deployment will reduce the UK’s CO2 emissions by 14.5 million tonnes each year.  So if we want to reduce CO2, there’s more to be saved by concentrating on food waste, rather than energy efficiency.

Which means the big question is:  Why don’t we give up on smart metering and try to persuade the country to achieve the same savings and CO2 reduction by educating them about food waste.  I think the latter might be a lot easier.  As any behavioural psychologist will tell you, if you’re going to change consumer behaviour, they need to trust you.  Survey after survey tells us that no-one trusts the utilities.  Yet we only need to look at the TV schedules and the sales of TV cookbooks to know that as a nation we trust our Jamies, Delias, Hestons and Gordons.  We even trust hairy bikers more than we trust utilities.

Then there’s pricing and choice.  The supermarkets know how to use pricing to affect usage in exactly the way that utilities don’t.  Instead of an increasingly regulated set of “one size fits all” tariffs, supermarkets employ a wide range of promotions and pricing to influence what we buy.  They’re particularly good at it because they collect, analyse and act on massive amounts of data.  Unlike the utilities, who struggle to produce correct bills based on one meter reading per year.

We can even use the campaign to promote healthier eating.  How much energy could we save if, as a nation, we didn’t boil our sprouts and cabbage until they’re a pulp, or roast our meat to a leathery black mass?  So addressing food waste could have a knock-on effect on energy saving, as well as improving our health.

The only fly in the ointment is the fickleness of the public, which this week’s headlines displayed.  That is a challenge not just for food waste, but also for smart metering.  A large part of the expected savings that “fund” the smart metering program come from consumer behaviour change, and there’s little evidence that consumers won’t be just as fickle in their energy saving as they are in their approach to food wastage, however much either initiative might save them. 

It would be nice to think that someone in Government is making this connection and asking what to do?  Because I suspect it would be more effective to tackle one of these issues properly rather than playing at both.  But smart metering has momentum.  So although concentrating on food waste would save the same amount of CO2, as well as saving consumers considerably more money, my guess is that the current momentum will win.  The irony is that the GB Smart Metering program only exists because of a Government requirement to meet the European 20-20-20 mandate on CO2 emissions.  It’s not because the utilities want it – in general, they don’t.

Which means that we will stagger on with an expensive, technically over-specified smart metering system to try and meet a European carbon target which is largely irrelevant, whilst ignoring an obscene on-going level of food waste.  Instead of saving money for the average consumer, it’s a strategy which will condemn them to spend more.

Which bring me back to the burger scare.  It makes you realise that the real problem is the attention to minutiae rather than looking at the big picture.  Small traces of horse in the food chain ought to be irrelevant, but they’re not. The public and press will fixate on detail rather than big picture.  The real question is whether the Government is backing the right horse?

So if we want some sanity to enter the smart metering program, I’d suggest that we learn from last week’s headlines and start spreading the rumour that French energy inspectors have detected traces of dog DNA in British smart meters.  That’s probably our only hope of having a rational debate.

The first company that I’m aware of to wirelessly enable a toilet was Greengoose, who have a sensor that you can fit to the toilet seat to determine whether or not it’s been left up by the most recent male user.  They see it as a fun application, and there’s nothing wrong with that.  However, just before CES got going I came across a far more serious Bluetooth toilet from Lixil in Japan.  There’s even a promotional video of it.

I’ve never been quite sure about the degree of technology that goes into Japanese toilets.  They moved into a world of their own when Toto (a Japanese bathroom manufacturer, and nothing to do with the Wizard of Oz) launched the Washlet in 1980.  Since then they’ve evolved to do almost everything including wiping your bottom.  The new Lixil one allows you to control its different functions using a Bluetooth link from your Android phone.  It even allows you to download music tracks to the inbuilt speaker in your toilet.  I’m not sure what they’re used for, but it reminds me of a musical potty that was put on the market about thirty years ago for toilet training toddlers.  For some reason that was never made clear, the UK version played the National Anthem whenever the child successfully emptied their bowels.  I’ve always wondered whether that might act as some form of Pavlovian behavioural training, so that in later life massed ranks of the population would soil themselves whenever the National Anthem was played.  The success of this year’s London Olympics suggest that either that was an unfounded worry, or that not many people bought the potties.  However I notice that they’ve still available in the US, albeit with “It’s a small world” as the theme tune, rather than the Star Spangled Banner, so maybe the manufacturers have learnt something in the last thirty years.

But I digress.  What is more important is that the Lixil toilet shows how wireless chips are getting into everyday and innovative new products that we might not have thought likely homes for them.  It’s only a one word change to take us from training potties to training bracelets, but the latter is a hot market for wireless connectivity.  For fans of these devices, January 14^th is the official launch date of the Amiigo, heralded as one of the most desirable training bracelets.  The sports and fitness market can be something of a fickle community.  If their blogs are to be believed, the Nike Fuel is already old hat, not so much a friendship band as a previous acquaintance band.  Jawbone’s UP is distinctly looked down upon after charging problems with the first version and the new clipless FitBit Flex with sleep monitor is probably only of interest to dozy armchair joggers.  For those who don’t want to encumber their wrists, you can look forward to a pair of Myontec training pants – the higher tech and even closer fitting successor to a veritable ribcage-full of strap-on heart rate monitors that have appeared.  Where Polar led, the commodity pack is following, with offerings from Beetsblu, iSport, Pearsport and Latitude amongst other.  I like the feature that Latitude promotes, which is that their monitor goes to sleep when it doesn’t detect your heartbeat.  Although I’m sure it’s a battery conservation strategy it does make you wonder whether they’re creating a new death and fitness category.

These are all moderately obvious applications of sensors and wireless technology.  They feed the geeky fashionista end of the sports and fitness market, which whilst mercurial in its favourites, is helping to drive a healthy pace of innovation.  What is interesting is watching some of the less obvious applications which are emerging alongside them.

When I was designing wireless modules at Ezurio, we proudly stated that we’d put Bluetooth into products as diverse as sex toys and snow ploughs.  Although the headlines don’t show it, that trend is continuing.  Classic Bluetooth is the mainstay of Nintendo’s Wii controllers, of which there are over 300 million in existence.  At the other end of the spectrum, Bluetooth is also the wireless enabler of Lixil’s toilets.  And the fact that Bluetooth Low Energy, or Bluetooth Smart as it’s called these days, is in iPhones and Androids means that there’s a growing number of other connected products.

At CES this week the Bluetooth SIG announced the finalists of its Breakthrough Awards 2012.  They include a wirelessly connected Asthma inhaler from Asthmapolis, LUMO’s back and posture belt, with its rather endearing movement buddy application, Weartech’s smart T-shirt with integrated cardiac sensors and the zSmart mood LED – a 6W LED bulb that you set to whatever colour and brightness suits you.

As well as these there are plenty of other notable products which didn’t make the final list.  There are numerous location tags to help prevent you losing valuable objects, including one from Ujuicer which suggests you can even use it for your pet and baby.  That might have been useful for David Cameron – the UK Prime Minister on the occasion he left his daughter in the pub.  On the more impressive side, it’s worth having a look at the bike trainer from Wahoo Fitness, which starts to push up the innovation stakes.  Bluetooth Smart is even starting to displace proprietary wireless solutions from toys, with Joybien – a company behind many radio controlled toys, demonstrating a 1/14 scale Lamborghini controlled using a Bluetooth Smart link to an iPhone at CES.   Over the coming year we’ll see a lot more.  And I suspect that we’ll have another Bluetooth fridge from LG, if only because that’s what they do.  Although Toshiba appears have pre-empted them this year, displaying a Bluetooth fridge, washing machine and microwave oven.  The last is particularly impressive, given that both operate at 2.4GHz.

However, it’s not all plain sailing in this brave new world of wireless chips with everything.  The biggest potential barrier to volume acceptance amongst the paying public isn’t what you can put wireless into – you can add wireless to almost everything, as CES is demonstrating.  It’s how easily you can connect these devices to phones and tablets.  Pairing of devices still remains the biggest single stumbling block to widespread acceptance of wireless, limiting the mass market to the early tech adopters and geeks.  Nintendo have shown that you can make it simple, albeit in a closed infrastructure, and the Wi-Fi Alliance have made headway with their WPS protected setup and pairing buttons. But both of these are very closed environments, which makes it much easier to implement pairing strategies. Simple, interoperable pairing between a plethora of different products from different manufacturers remains the elephant in the room which the industry needs to address.

So a recent pairing solution of a slightly different kind caught my eye.  Blacksocks.com has come up with an answer to the problem that has been plaguing mankind (with an emphasis on the masculine half of the species) for many years – that of non-matching socks.  They’ve introduced a Plus+ range of socks with RFID tags which allows you to pair them correctly after each wash, using their Bluetooth enabled Sock-Sorter.  I do question the business model.  My suspicion is that the target market probably buys their socks in bulk in one design, so have no need of a pairing solution, but that’s another matter.  What it does suggest is that NFC is reaching a price-point where it’s cost effective to incorporate, almost for free.  (In case you think this might be a spoof product, not least because of its Orwellian double-plus name, it’s not.  You can see the innards of the sock sorter and the official test certificates at the FCC site.)

Back in 2007, when Bluetooth 2.1 was released, the early demonstrations used NFC as a way to illustrate how to perform simple secure pairing.  I don’t think any commercial product took it up, but maybe the time has come to reconsider it.  A recent report from ABIresearch suggested that only around 30 million wireless health and fitness devices shipped last year.  That’s against cumulative totals of well over 300 million Wii controllers, 10 billion Bluetooth chips and 5 billion Wi-Fi chips.  In comparison to these numbers, all of these exciting new products are still little more than a dent in the overall quantity of wireless chip shipments.  Unless we make it easier for consumers to connect a plethora of different sensor devices and monitors to their phones, that’s not going to change.  We’ve had a year of innovation.  What we need in 2013 is a year of pragmatism where we make these new products work out of the box.  Otherwise they will never be much more than a CES novelty.  It’s an important challenge that we need to crack.  I hope we manage to solve it in 2013.  If we do, the future for product designers and consumers will be a lot more fun.

As a footnote, Sony announced some new Bluetooth speakers at CES which do use NFC for pairing.  I don’t know how open their API and implementation is, but it sounds like a step in the right direction.

(Thanks to Chris for the title.)

It’s a concept that consumers have a problem with.  Survey after survey reports the message that consumers don’t understand tariffs.  They don’t even understand the word.  And regulators are often less than happy with multiple or complex tariffs, because they’re aware how much they confuse people.  That was highlighted in the UK earlier this year when the regulator OFGEM took the paddle to the utilities to persuade them to reduce the hundreds of tariffs in the UK to a few simple ones.  But that doesn’t stop utilities fantasising about a future where they can run riot with tariffs.  The most extreme example is now being constructed in the UK as part of the British smart metering specifications.  These allow a level of complexity that makes the most diabolic tortures devised by the Inquisition look simple.  Fighting the consumer interest corner is our Energy regulator – OFGEM, which is about to give up on persuasion and start meting out some punishment itself.

There are some valid reasons for considering complex tariffs, but these need to include consumer engagement as a fundamental feature of their development.  What is happening instead, particularly in theUK, is that tariffing structures are being developed as a technical exercise.  They are now so complex that they threaten the interoperability, cost and usability of the British smart metering roll-out, setting smart metering up to be the next major UK Government IT disaster. 

Over the last few years I’ve been involved in designing products and digital services that attempt to change consumer energy behaviour through education and nudges.  I’ve also been involved in specification groups which are designing the capability for smart meters to support incredibly complex tariff structures.  There is precious little coming together of minds between these two groups.  The first is customer centric, helping people to learn and change.  The latter is totally technical, driven in many cases by competing industry members trying to demonstrate that they can add more features than their competitors – essentially little different to a competition of little boys seeing how high they can piss up the wall.  Unfortunately this latter approach plays to the mentality of most utilities.  They are naturally risk averse, and when confronted by a new paradigm, prefer a complex specification which they can use as a tick box list to compare suppliers, rather than the less measurable approach of trying to engage with customers.  That’s not surprising – they’ve been pilloried for their incompetence in consumer engagement for the last decade.  Their natural reaction to that is to grasp an option that lets them mandate and use force, rather than attempt to engage with customers and potentially fail again.

There is little attempt to find a middle ground.  That has a real risk, as the technical solution is gathering momentum.  It is now so complex that I fear it will not work, which will waste tens of billions of pounds in an abortive smart metering deployment.  The one spark of hope is OFGEM’s current consultation on the retail market, which is calling for a cap to tariff complexity.  But even if they succeed in that, the technical complexity of the current specification will make it hard to engage consumers.

I’ve written this white paper both to explain the current complexity of the tariffing schemes, and also to highlight the conflict between the technical and the inclusive approach.  TheUKis at the front of the charge for complexity.  Unless it is challenged, others will follow, potentially damaging smart metering and preventing its real benefits from being realised. 

I believe that it is important to reconsider how we are going to achieve the necessary level of consumer change, and the price we might be paying by mandating complexity.  Please read it and let me have your comments.

Twas on a Monday morning,
The gasman came to call.
My meter wouldn’t work,
It wasn’t being smart at all.
He put another meter in,
It took him several hours.
But it couldn’t send a reading, as the comms hub wasn’t powered!

Oh, it all makes work,
For the working man to do!

Twas on a Tuesday morning,
The comms hub man appeared.
He wiggled his antennas
And he said “It’s as I feared.
Your DLMS is buggered,
Your ZigBee’s obsolete. 
But I’ve set you up on prepay.”  So off went all my heat!

Oh, it all makes work
For the folk at DECC to do!

 
Twas on a Wednesday morning,
The DCC man came.
He asked my for my date of birth,
My shoe size and my name.
He said “You’ve failed security,
I’ll have to go away
And check it with my database.  But have a free display!”

Oh, it all makes work
Over at GCHQ!

 
Twas on a Thursday morning
The Display man tapped my door.
He showed me lots of menus,
But I’m not sure what they’re for.
He said “It shows your gas bill,
And your current tariff rate.
But that isn’t what they’ll charge you, as the head-end’s out of date!”

Oh, it all makes work,
For consulting folk to do!

 
Twas on a Friday morning,
The Head End man came by.
I showed him my new meter
And he gave a heartfelt sigh.
“That’s not SMETS2”, he said to me, 
“It won’t connect at all.”
But he wrote my meter reading down and told me who to call!

Yes, it still makes work,
For the working man to do!

On Saturdays and Sundays,
They charge a call-out fee.
So I bought some solar panels and migrated to PV!

This is obviously the short version.  Writers are needed for another 1,820 verses to take us through to 2020, when every house in Great Britain will be reaping the benefits from have working smart meters and IHDs.

If you’ve never heard the original version by Flanders and Swann, you can listen to it here.  Or buy the piano score and play it yourself while you wait for your smart meter to arrive.