There’s a lot of debate within the industry about who owns Smart Energy. Is it the utilities? Is it the consumer? Will it be Google? Until now, nobody has spotted who the real owner is, but at last it can be revealed – it’s the ZigBee Alliance. They quietly trademarked the phrase “Smart Energy” in the US last December. So if you make any Smart Energy product using any form of wireless, it may be time to get your cheque book out.
Smart Energy, mHealth and the Chocolate Factory
Although they may seem strange bedfellows, both the mHealth industry the smart metering industries (both favourite children of the technology world), are facing the same problem. Both are moving from a world of almost no data to data overload of a level they never imagined, even in their worst nightmares. Whether it’s from an annual health check or a visit from the meter reader, both are used to getting one data point per customer per year. The advent of connected sensors means that is changing to anything up to one reading per second.
It’s a bit like the case of a child who has hitherto only been allowed chocolate on Christmas Day. Now they’re being led into a chocolate factory and told they can eat as much as they want. The inevitable result is a very happy child for a few hours, until they’re violently sick. At which point they either vow never to eat another chocolate, or learn to treat it in a more sensible manner.
Today the medical industry and energy utilities are being shown the doors of the chocolate factory. We have yet to see how they behave once they enter it. Some may emerge as triumphant Charlies, but others risk becoming the commercial equivalent of Augustus Gloop and Veruca Salt.
Hacking Smart Meters, Single Chips and Updating
This week was an interesting one for smart metering announcements. Accent – a Franco-Italian semiconductor design house announced their smart meter on a chip, prompting Jesse Berst of Smart Grid News to enthuse that the “Smart Metering Business has just changed for ever“. Sorry Jesse, but I don’t think so. Elsewhere, in Providence, Rhode Island, New England hackers were convening at QuahogCon to discuss the security of standards. The two announcements provided a good demonstration of the gulf between the promoters of smart metering and the reality of the state of the standards they intend to use. In the same week, ZigBee closed its call for comments on the Technical requirements Document for its Smart Energy Profile, giving the impression that the standard is not far from completion.
The gulf between the enthusiasts and realists is wide. It is worrying that much of the industry is rushing blindly towards deployment, with little understanding of the risks and what can be done to mitigate them.
One of key mantras I keep on hearing repeated when security of the smart meter is raised is “why would anyone bother to hack it?” Josh Wright, talking about ZigBee security at QuahogCon hit the nail on the head when he answered that. “As an attacker, ZigBee lets me interact with the real world – that’s exciting. I can interact with a dam, or natural gas distribution lines. We’re looking at a wireless protocol that lets us interact with real things in the real world – it’s not just credit cards.” The industry forgets the excitement that comes from “because I can” and “real things” And it only needs a few people doing that to fuel scare stories that will kill the whole industry.
FDA and Regulation. The dangers of crying Wolf.
Everyone seems to think that mHealth is about to take off. mobihealthnews.com’s recent roundup of analyst predictions estimated sales of around $4 billion per year by 2014, and my own more fanciful review of potential savings ran into tens of billions of dollars. Network Operators are setting up mHealth divisions faster than you can say “long term chronic condition” and the outpouring of mHealth apps for smartphones continues to grow exponentially.
It has all of the characteristics of the next technical bubble, but with the added benefit that, if we can make it work, it might actually save our healthcare systems from terminal meltdown. We need the disruption that mHealth will bring. As Clayton Christensen points out in his seminal book – The Innovator’s Prescription, the only way we are going to effect a major change in healthcare is through the introduction of new, parallel business models to challenge those that our current healthcare structure is built on. That will need new technologies that provide more effective diagnosis of symptoms, as well as devices that encourage personal participation in healthcare by putting monitoring and health records into the hands of patients. Which are exactly the areas being targeted by the mHealth community.
However, there’s an invisible gorilla in the mHealth room that could consign the whole enterprise to history. It’s called the FDA. The FDA has the ability to apply regulations that would choke the development of mHealth. Like all regulators, the FDA moves slowly – far more slowly than the emerging mHealth technology. It is important for the industry to engage with it to reset the levels of regulation for mHealth. What is worrying is that most of the noise around regulation is not about that resetting of expectations, but scare-mongering about the possible reaction of the FDA to an expansion of connected healthcare and new delivery methods. It’s important that manufacturers understand the barriers that regulation might bring, but we’re at risk of crying “Wolf” to the extent that mHealth may never happen, or else only evolve outside the U.S.
Full Bluetooth low energy standard published
This week, at the Bluetooth annual All Hands Meeting in Seattle, the final draft of the new Bluetooth low energy specification was made available. Last December, the core specification for the low energy radio was adopted, allowing silicon vendors to start their production process, so that chips would be available as soon as the rest of the specification is adopted. This week’s release allows software and application developers to begin work on designing the new ecosystem of products that will be use Bluetooth low energy.
Outside the confines of the technical working groups, Bluetooth low energy is still a fairly well kept secret. Yet it has the potential to overtake Bluetooth usage in just a few years, growing to a volume of multiple billions of chips per year. It is the only wireless technology that has the potential to challenge and surpass the shipment volumes of cellular. Yet even within the Bluetooth community, there are many that have not yet understood this potential.
One of the reasons for that lack of understanding is that Bluetooth low energy is a wireless standard for a new generation of applications. Every previous wireless standard comes from the mindset of being a cable replacement which connects devices that never change their behaviour. That is true even if there’s a mesh involved. And it’s the way that most products were designed until a year or two ago.
Two things have changed that. The first is the concept of machine-to-machine communications where products connect directly to the Internet. The second is the emergence of the Apps store, where handset owners can download and install new features every day. Bluetooth low energy has a new architecture that fits both of these models. Even more importantly, it allows them to converge. As such, it is the first wireless technology designed for the second decade of this century. Here’s why…
Can mHealth save the NHS?
There’s an election looming in the UK, which is causing problems for the political parties. Everyone knows that we need major public spending cuts, but no politician is going to risk votes by committing to anything too great. So everyone is carefully skirting the issue, particularly where the NHS is concerned. The British public have a love-hate relationship with the NHS. They love to deride its inefficiencies and problems, but as soon as anyone attempts to take an axe to it, it transmutes into the most valuable aspect of being British.
Of course, those of us involved with healthcare know that this is more than just an election issue. The changing demographics mean that the NHS, and every other health system in the world is heading for financial meltdown. Rather than acknowledge it, our politicians (even those who have been pushing through the U.S. Health reform bill) are doing little more than being fitted for their lemming suits and asking for directions to the edge of the cliff. We cannot afford healthcare in its present form and we’re running out of time to address that inconvenient truth.
One straw that is invariable grasped and brandished is the potential of mHealth (or eHealth, telecare or eCare) to sweep away the costs. So in the spirit of helping our flailing politicians, I thought it might be an opportune time to review how it’s doing.