Bluetooth low energy – Page 5 – Creative Connectivity

Bluetooth low energy – that Eureka moment

One of the nice things about working in technology is those moments when everything clicks and you go “Wow – that’s neat”. It’s something that happens as you work with many of the different standards and you realise that the collective intelligence of those putting it together really is greater than the sum of the parts.

Over the years I’ve had that Eureka moment with a number of wireless standards. They don’t all have it. Wi-Fi doesn’t – it just does a good job of making Ethernet wireless. GSM has it in the unlikely form of SMS. Kevin Holley, who was probably more responsible for SMS than anyone else, should be given an award for that. ZigBee has it – it’s the moment you realise that within the network you’ve just configured, multiple devices can be having their own, independent wireless conversations at the same time.

Despite years of being involved with Bluetooth, I’ve not found it there. Bluetooth is very impressive in its thoroughness, but again, it’s good, competent specmanship, which does what it says on the box. What Bluetooth has done is to provide a solid base of knowledge for the development of the new Bluetooth low energy standard, which was adopted today. Over the last year I’ve been helping develop the standard and explaining it to designers and engineers around the world. During that process I’ve realised that it doesn’t have just one, but two of those Eureka moments. And it’s been obvious at the conferences I’ve been speaking at, that as soon as developers understand it, they share that excitement. These two features are the ability for a device to talk directly to a web application, and how easy it is to use.

Smart Meters and Stupid Governments – Time for Dedicated Spectrum

Are our governments really serious about Smart Metering, or are they just throwing money away as a political gesture? Increasingly it looks as if it’s the latter. Barack Obama just made a headline announcement that the U.S. Government is prepared to waste $3.4 billion putting smart meters into 13% of U.S. homes. The reason for my cynicism is a lack of standards, particularly with respect to the choice of a wireless specification to link the meters with each other and to appliances around the home. The current choices are not based on any understanding of technology, rather than lobbying by companies desperate for funding. As a result, there’s a strong chance that these meters will not work.

I was at the Wireless Congress in Munich last week and listened to at least four different wireless standards explain why they’re each the best choice for smart meters. Not one of them was really convincing. Most had slick marketing presentations, but underneath, there are some very good technical reasons as to why NONE of the current pretenders are the correct one to choose if we really want smart energy to work.

The critical problem is the choice of the 2.4GHz frequency band, which is where most of the contenders operate. Ten years ago that portion of spectrum, known as an Industrial Scientific and Medical band (ISM) was virtually empty. Microwave ovens used it, but only for a few minutes each day. Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and ZigBee were all still dreams. It was like a freeway built before cars arrived. Today it is already congested and each new evolution of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi eat up even more of it. In another ten years, which is before the Smart Meter rollouts will even have been completed, it is likely to be at a standstill.

Smart Metering is an initiative that will cost billions of euros / dollars to install and which needs to continue to work for a lifespan of twenty or more years. All of the prospective wireless technologies being considered for use in Smart Meters operate in open frequency bands that are likely to be heavily congested before the smart meter installation program is even started. To use this spectrum for something as critical as smart metering is folly.

If Smart Metering is going to provide benefits, it deserves its own wireless spectrum and standard. It’s not too late for regulators to set aside spectrum and for standards bodies to get together to produce an optimal standard. If they don’t, we risk wasting trillions of dollars and failing to achieve any reduction in energy consumption.

Bluetooth low energy – the Momentum Builds

It’s been a good week for Bluetooth low energy. At times it’s felt like a long, slow path since it was first announced as Wibree in October 2006, but that feeling is changing as the standard is coming to completion. This week saw the first Bluetooth low energy conference take place in Munich where chips vendors were showing off demos, whilst on the other side of the world, at the ARM Techcon in Santa Clara, there were more live demonstrations of the technology.

The mood of the industry has become increasingly upbeat. It was noticeable in Munich that a significant number of companies have moved from cautious interest to being serious about starting to deploy it. The questions that they are asking have changed to the practical ones of qualification and access to test equipment. That change in mood was reinforced by the Bluetooth SIG announcing that the specification is on course to be released this December.

The Bluetooth low energy standard can be confusing at first. Although it carries the name Bluetooth, it is a completely new radio with a completely new protocol stack on top of it. It has been designed from scratch to allow developers to add connectivity to products that only want to send small pieces of data on an irregular basis, but with such low power consumption that it can run on coin cells. The companies attending the Conference in Munich have understood that difference and are keen to exploit the new products and service models that Bluetooth low energy offers.

Continua Health Alliance takes the bigamous route – Bluetooth and ZigBee.

After months of debate, the Continua Health Alliance finally announced its choice of wireless technology for low power medical devices. Bluetooth low energy and ZigBee have been the key antagonists in this process and today Continua decided to make it a threesome and share its bed with both partners.

Both brides proudly announced the forthcoming nuptials, Bluetooth claiming that it had been chosen as the Health Device Standard, and ZigBee pronouncing that it has been selected for the next generation standard.

Whilst most people outside the specification groups will dismiss this as irrelevant, it does have some important implications, as it presents medical device manufacturers with a dilemma – which of these two wireless standards do they choose? We’re at a point in time where we’re about to witness a new phenomenon of internet connected, consumer medical devices, which will open up the possibility of a new era of personal healthcare. If manufacturers become confused about which of two incompatible standards to use, they’ll delay their products, with a resulting delay in availability and implementation. It’s important that doesn’t happen.

Bluetooth is winning the Medical and Fitness Market

Everyone knows that Bluetooth is in their phone and their headset. What few realise is how many other products rely on it for their connectivity. Over the past few years I’ve been working with manufacturers and organisations to integrate wireless into their products, particularly in the area of healthcare and fitness. Having spoken about the current state of play at a recent conference, it struck me that most of Bluetooth’s success in this area is invisible. The reality is very different, as the recent statement from the Bluetooth SIG acknowledges – Bluetooth is present in over 20 million health and fitness devices. Market leaders like Philips, Nonin, Polar, Nintendo and Medtronics have chosen it. That’s not a arbitrary choice, but one that they’ve made for good technical reasons. To explain why, I’ve written a report about Bluetooth and the health ecosystem it is enabling. In it I cover the reasons it has achieved its current success and how it is poised to become the standard for all consumer health and fitness products. I also cover the changing health demographics to illustrate the reason we need it. To find out why, download the report –

Download “A Bluetooth Ecosystem for Health and Fitness”

bluetooth-the-wireless-ecosystem-for-health-fitness-and-assisted-living.pdf – Downloaded 10643 times – 382.90 KB .

Bluetooth low energy will save forgetful US business travellers $300 million per year

At the Bluetooth low energy preview day in Tokyo, a spokesman for Nokia reported an interesting statistic. Every year, 300,000 laptops are lost or left behind by passengers at U.S. airports. Apparently that’s greater than the number of mobile phones left at airports, suggesting that most travellers consider their phone to be more important than their laptop, but that’s another story. At first sight the figure seems staggering, but it’s only around one laptop per airport per day. What is staggering is the resulting cost of replacement, which equates to a third of a billion dollars every year.

The reason for raising this statistic is to point out one of the new applications which will be made possible by Bluetooth low energy. Bluetooth low energy (previously known as Wibree) is the new Bluetooth standard that is coming out this year and which enables devices to be produced which include a wireless link to transmit small amounts of data, and support a battery life that can extend into years. One of the first applications that will ship is access control or proximity detection. Which is why it can save the US economy $300,000,000 every year.