Creative Connectivity

Coronavirus – The UK’s Ventilator Exit Strategy

As the UK moves towards a more major lockdown, it’s becoming apparent that this will not be a short-term disruption. Imperial College have published their modelling plans, on which the UK strategy has been based and it’s clear there is no quick fix. The Coronacrisis looks set to be with us for the next twelve to eighteen months.

It’s a hundred years since the Spanish flu pandemic, for which society had no medical solution. The result was that millions died around the world, as the best that medical science could do was to alleviate the symptoms of the dying. Since then, medical science has progressed to the point that people expect it to save them this time around. The unfortunate truth is that we have no drugs or vaccine available and it will probably be eighteen months before we do. Until then, all we can do to limit the spread is suppression, i.e. keeping people apart to reduce the number of infections.

Where we have made advances is in the technology to treat those who progress to secondary infections which are resulting in the death toll. Again, we have no pharmaceutical cure, but we can use ventilators on Intensive Care Units which can save many patients. Not all, as anyone with underlying health issues is likely to succumb. The following chart, based on US stats from Statista shows the percentage of patients who need intensive care after hospital admission, broken down for different age ranges. It also shows the mortality rate. If you are young or healthy, ventilators have a big effect on survival rate.

Hearables market to reach $80 billion in 2025

Who could have guessed, back in 2014, that a Kickstarter campaign would lead to an $80 billion market segment in just over a decade? But that’s what is happening with hearables, where a new report predicts that it will reach that size in 2025.

The growth of earbuds, which are now the “must-have” hearable for around 80 million users, has turned into the fastest growing consumer electronics product sector ever, eclipsing even the iPhone. That growth is set to accelerate even more with the launch of a new Bluetooth LE Audio standard at CES 2020, which allows designers even more freedom, higher quality and new audio applications.

It all started when Bragi managed to raise almost $3.4m dollars for a new concept – a set of stereo earbuds which could stream music as well as measuring your vital signs. A raft of other startups managed to raise over $50 million in crowdfunding investment between them before Apple arrived with their AirPods, and the rest is history.

Will Amazon’s Echo Buds challenge Apple’s Airpods?

In the five and a half years since I coined the term “Hearables” the market has grown at an amazing rate. At the time I estimated that the market for the things we put in our ears might grow to $7.6 billion in 2018. I think it just nudged over that to reach $7.8 billion. What I hadn’t anticipated was the success of Apple’s Airpods, which are driving adoption even faster, more or less doubling their sales volume every year. With the recent launch of Amazon’s Echo Buds, which could attract a new audience with the promise of a life which is “Always Alexa”, as well as the availability of a growing number of Bluetooth enabled hearing aids, the market looks as if it could reach $22 billion in 2020.

Hearables had a slow start. Although Apple probably started its Airpod design project as far back as 2013, the first thing that the public saw was Bragi’s Kickstarter campaign for their Dash earbuds. In March 2014, the Dash became famous as the most heavily funded Kickstarter project, raising $3.4 million. Another crowdfunded startup – Earin, beat them to market by a few months, but Bragi eventually got the Dash out in February 2016. In that first year of hearables, (or the first fifty-one weeks, as Apple finally started shipping Airpods in the last week of the year), global shipments from all manufacturers were probably not much more than 100,000 units, most of which were the early MFI compliant Bluetooth hearing aids. In that last week of 2016, Apple probably sold more Airpods than the rest of the industry had shipped through the course of the year. Four years on from that humble start, 2019 will probably see 75 million sets of hearables shipped. That makes hearables the fastest growing tech product ever.

What the Smart Metering Debacle tells us about the reality of the Irish Backstop

Last week, the UK Government finally admitted the obvious, presumably in the hope that the announcement would be lost in the Brexit noise, which is that the GB Smart Metering Programme rollout has been delayed by four years to 2024. For those who don’t know the history, back in 2011, the Government announced that it was instigating a smart metering programme which would see 53 million domestic smart meters installed by the end of 2019. We’re approaching that date and the latest figures show that only 2 million compliant SMETS2 meters have been installed. Despite many of us having pointed out the issues for years, it’s only now that reality has dawned on our ministers, who have set a new target of 2024. Many in the industry believe that’s equally fictional and are suggesting that 2030 is more realistic. That would mean a total of nineteen years for a project that was originally meant to take less than seven years to complete. Over the course of the project, costs have spiralled, although BEIS – the ministry now in charge of the project are still doing their best to dream up magic benefits, presumably because of a concern that if they revealed the full impact, any Minister in their right mind would cancel the project.

The announcement was hardly unexpected. Along with many others, I have been critical of the project since its early days, when it became obvious that that it was being driven by ideology rather than practical requirements. Countries such as Italy managed a national deployment in a couple of years at a fraction of the price. The difference with the GB programme is that it was politically led, turning into the latest in a long line of Government IT disasters. However, the announcement is timely, as it comes at the point when our current Ministers are promoting a technical solution to the Irish border as an alternative to the backstop. If we assume that the same mistakes will occur, as they have done again and again in previous IT projects, it is unlikely that we would see anything workable in place before 2030. More worryingly, it is likely to be hacked by organised crime well before that.

Hearing Loss takes the Stage in Edinburgh

The Edinburgh Fringe Festival is the largest in the world, with around 2,500 different performances taking place each day. It attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors over the course of three weeks, sells almost three million tickets and showcases some of the best performances from around the world. It also seems to attract the world’s worst sound technicians, who think that volume is the only thing that matters. So it was refreshing to find a couple of shows this year which highlighted the issues of hearing loss. Around a quarter of us will experience hearing loss during our lives, so it is important that people become more aware of how to protect their hearing, as well as understanding the consequences of hearing loss and for society to remove the stigma of wearing hearing aids.

When Smart Meters go wrong

Most people don’t think much about firmware – the embedded software which runs the microcontrollers in all of the devices we have around us. We’re aware of the frustration when they don’t do what they’re meant to, at which point we realise that “smart” may not have been the best adjective to use to promote the product, but even when they do go wrong, turning them off and on again, or taking the battery out generally clears the problem. They almost always go wrong because the design process didn’t include enough testing, or not enough time was given over to thinking about the “edge cases” – those unexpected combinations of events which result in things not working the way they should. Most of the time it’s just a short-term annoyance; if it’s worse than that we’ll probably send it back, or throw it out and buy a new one.

However, we do expect safety critical devices like cars and planes and national infrastructure to be a lot better designed than this. Your boiler turning off because it thinks there’s a flow problem when there isn’t is annoying (time for a firmware upgrade please, Vailant), but it’s not life threatening. In contrast, a self-driving car that runs over a cyclist is not something the public is generally happy about. Nor is a plane falling out of the sky. But where would you put a smart meter in the scale of things that might affect your life? Last week we found out, and it’s not a happy answer.