Medica goes Wireless

Medica claims to be the world’s largest medical show.  It’s a very monochrome event – all of the equipment is white and shiny, and most of the exhibitors and visitors are soberly dressed in dark suits, as befits the serious profession of medicine and spending money in Dusseldorf.  Looking at the equipment on display and the crowds thronging the show, you certainly wouldn’t get any impression that there’s a recession around, other than slightly more suits than normal and rather fewer bow-ties around the necks of the visiting consultants.

As far as the medical industry is concerned, it’s business as usual, and hopefully more so, as more of us get older and less healthy.  But there are some interesting trends.  One of which is the increased prevalence of wireless connectivity.  In previous years equipment manufacturers were happy for nurses to jot down the readings from their instruments.  A few devices had wireless links, but they were the exception.  This year, particularly at the consumer end of the market, wireless was becoming the norm, at least at the top end of product ranges.

Almost all of that was Bluetooth.  I stopped counting after the first hundred devices, and that was in just two of the twenty halls.  ANT was in evidence, helped with a demonstration of a prototype X10 Nano phone from Sony Ericsson, which was using the ANT protocol to connect to a weighing scale, heart rate belt and pedometer.  Wi-Fi was there in a few products, but mostly confined to tags for asset management, and I failed to find a single ZigBee medical device.  There also seemed to be very little profile for the Continua Alliance in terms of products or signage.  Even The Intel stand was conspicuously Continua-free.

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Bluetooth Low Energy rides the Wave at Electronica

Electronica only comes every other year but it’s still the biggest electronics trade show in the world.  The last time it ran, Bluetooth low energy was still better known as Wibree.  In the intervening two years half a dozen companies have announced chips and the standard has been completed and published.  So visitors to Munich last week had the first major opportunity for to see just how much progress has been made.

It’s obvious that the industry has moved from PowerPoint presentations to reality.  Chips were on display, along with development boards and the first few modules.  In the Forum within Electronica there were sessions on the applications it will enable, and in the adjoining Wireless Congress a full day’s track was devoted to developer training and further applications.

The silicon and tools are definitely here.  Now it’s time for developers to add their imagination.

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Ten Wireless Standards, Sitting on the Wall…

The Smart Metering industry is deperate to decide on a standard for short range communication.  The UK Goverment has rushed through its consultation with a deadline for a technical standard by the end of next year, and in the US, SGIP’s PAP02 group wants to do it even faster.  Whilst we need to start deploying devices, it concerns me that there’s a rush to make decisions with very little consideration of the relative merits of the different contenders.

There’s no shortage of contenders.  At the last count I came across ten short range wireless standards that all think they should be the winner.  Those include Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, ZigBee, Wavenis, Dash7, wireless MBUS, wireless KNX, DECT, Z-Wave and Bluetooth low energy.  And they’re just the industry developed standards.

What worried me even more than the obvious rush was a off-hand comment made in a European standards meeting that I attended earlier this year.  One of the people responsible for deciding on a common standard for Europe made the comment that “we’re not going to give any time to industry standards”.  The subject of her venom was ZigBee, but it’s a charge that I’m increasingly hearing levelled at all of the “industry” standards.  It appears there’s a perception amongst members of the older established Standards Development Organisations (SDOs) that because industry standards have not been produced by their traditional specification process, they’re not as good.  That’s a very dangerous approach to take.

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RF4CE – The wireless remote control that keeps coming back

The consumer electronics industry has always had something of a love-hate relationship with remote controls.  It’s painful to design and ship a new remote control with every product, but attempts to come up with an interoperable standard have been plagued with problems.  As a result our homes are littered with lost and unused remote controls.  A few independent companies have tried to solve the problem by producing decent, but generally expensive universal controls, but they’re still a rarity around the home.

In the early days of remotes, the dominant technology was ultrasonic, but they’ve evolved to the point today that almost all use infra red (IR) transmitters.  IR is cheap and directional; the latter feature being useful in a world where there is limited interoperability and interference can be mitigated by pointing the remote control in the right direction.  However, it’s a one way connection, as keeping a photo diode alive to look for a signal coming back from the TV would decimate the battery life.

As the audio-video equipment we buy has become more sophisticated, manufacturers have been looking for an alternative technology that would allow low power, two-way communication between equipment and remote.  The obvious solution is wireless, but the question is which one?  A few years ago chip vendors who were looking for customers for their 802.15.4 radio ICs, decided to put together a standard to try and sell a few more of their chips.  (802.15.4 is underlying radio standard used by ZigBee and other specialist wireless stacks, none of which are shipping in the volumes required to make chip manufacture very profitable.)  That standard became known as RF4CE (Radio Frequency for Consumer Electronics) and was eventually embraced by the ZigBee Alliance.  The Japanese AV industry bought the story and have recently begun shipping RF4CE handsets into their local market.  As the volumes have ramped up, rumours are growing that an increasing number are being returned because they don’t work.  It’s too early to be sure what the reason is, but when you delve into the detail of the RF4CE standard it looks a bit flaky.  That could herald a golden opportunity for Bluetooth low energy, which is charging onto the remote control scene like a wireless knight in shining armour.

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Presence – the new location

There’s a subtle change about to happen to our mobile devices and the way we interact with them.  Today everyone is excited about the use of GPS in mobile phones to inform them of where they are.  That’s about to become old hat.  GPS applications are an interim step in terms of the evolution of location based applications, albeit an immensely valuable one.  But the more important concept is that of presence.

Presence is much more than just knowing where you are – it’s about communicating your presence with friends, the things around you and the web.  It also provides the ability to use that knowledge to determine how your personal devices and applications work.  Presence moves us from the paradigm of the traditional “You are here” sign, which applies to everyone in the area, to the far more personal concept of “I am here”.  It’s the next step in social networking and interacting with the web.  We’re already seeing the beginning of it with applications like Foursquare, Gowalla and Loopt, but they’re only the start, as new technologies will make it even easier to gain an awareness of and invoke conversation with our surroundings.

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ANT runs scared as Bluetooth low energy appears

It’s always interesting seeing how industries react to new entrants.  ANT has been having a successful time in persuading sports and fitness manufacturers to use its standard for wireless connectivity.  That’s partly because it does what it says on the tin and partly because it’s not had a lot of competition.

This week, following the launch of Bluetooth low energy, the FAQ on the ANT website makes the strange claim that once Bluetooth low energy becomes available in mobile phones, ANT devices can take advantage of a bridge in watches to talk to phones.  It’s difficult to understand what, other than desperation at the advent of real competition, is driving them to say that.  It’s like telling vegetarians that you have a cunning plan which will enable them to eat meat.

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