标签: wearable

The world of Wearable Engineering Demystified through this simple Infographic from Mistral: http://www.mistralsolutions.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/infographic.html

  In 2014, wearable technology saw an enormous increase in popularity with Internet searches for related terms increasing ten-fold and over $1 billion invested towards development in this domain.  While the technology is still in its infancy, experts predict that wearable devices will rise at a 154 percent annual compound rate through 2017 with over 110 million devices being sold. Analysts at Morgan Stanley believe it will become a $1.6 trillion business in the near-future. Crowdfunding has become the source of choice in bringing creative ideas to the wearable market, and 2014 saw crowdfunding companies like Kickstarter and Indiegogo raise money with high success and delivery rates.    There are several technologies that revolutionize wearable devices; few of them are Sensors, Form factor, Display and software. At present motion sensors like accelerometers, gyroscopes, magnetometers, pressure sensors are the dominant type of sensors used in wearables. UI-related MEMS sensors microphones for voice control will be integrated to wearables soon. Form factor also plays a major role in wearable technology; not just with respect to the SoC but also for the entire system. Packages like quad flat no-lead (QFN), micro-chip-scale packaging (uCSP) and wafer scale chip packaging (CSP) are popular solutions for power management, microcontrollers and wireless functions due to their small form factors which can be used on small PCBs or integrated with the use of flex-based circuits. Android Wear OS brought Google into the software world of wearables when it was launched on March 18, 2014. There is also Tizen, the open-source by Samsung and Intel, MediaTek’s LinkIt and the Wearable OS expected from LG.   The focus in the current wearable market is clearly on wrist-mounted devices like smartwatches, fitness bands or a combination of the two. But, the future of wearables is not limited to our wrists alone. There are plenty of places like Medical and Banking that manufacturers are keen to venture into with their desirable tech pieces. Google, Apple and  Microsoft have launched their own health Wellness platforms to extract data from people who are having a health conditions about what they have done or to measure essential data. Doctors have increasingly shown interest in using these wearables to give regular information to the patients about health; by tracking and providing corrective inputs on the fly. A few Canadian banks are exploring the option of using a wrist band made by a startup “Bionym” that will measure ECG pattern to authenticate payments.   Cambridge Consultants are working on a UV hair slide that would tell how much UV exposure you have had on a summer day! A pair of headphones could monitor your heart’s electrical activity and feed the data to your smart phone. Several developers are working on a tattoo that will be implanted on the skin of the hand and would interact with everything that a person touches like locking/unlocking doors, protecting credit card information and so on. These new gadgets are just around the corner. Some of the other product trends that are emerging in the wearable world are:     Sensors and Glasses – There are already a host of photo-snapping life-loggers available in the market such as the OMG Life Autographer and the Narrative Clip. They will take pictures throughout your day and keep a log of your movements to build sharable photographic memory of the day. Then there are devices like the Sony Core which is a waterproof sensor and can pair with a camera to keep track of special moments or a fitness band to give your workout a new dimension.   Tech-Woven Clothes - Implanted technology will likely be the preserve of medical applications, at least in the new future. But not so for tech-woven clothes. Fashion giant Ralph Lauren recently took the initiative by announcing The Polo Tech Shirt. This shirt is designed to be used when exercising; embedded with various sensors that would collect the user’s biometric data, heart rate, how much calories burned, distance traveled and intensity of movement. Dolce Gabbana in collaboration with Motorola are also working on a tech-woven clothing indicating that this may definitely emerge as a huge trend.   Automobile – BMW showcased their research vehicle i3 at CES 2015 that could lead to collision free driving in the near future. Smartwatch can be used by the driver to park the vehicle through the remote-control valet parking system developed by BMW.  According to the company, a driver can activate the “Remote Valet Parking assistant” through an app, which would guide the vehicle to a parking spot all by itself. This car works with the help of laser sensors that scan the surrounding environment so it can move without running into anything.   Home Automation - Soon, switching on the lights in your house will involve a simple wrist-and-hand gesture as you walk through the door and another gesture would turn on the HDTV and Xbox while dimming the den lights. When you are set to go out, another hand gesture would switch off all your home’s lights and lock all the doors. Playtabase wristband “Reemo” would make all of this possible.   Aviation - Japan Airlines ensures that its gate agents are equipped with smartwatches at the Tokyo Haneda Airport’s Terminal 1, enabling them to receive location-specific tasks from the control desk which can track their whereabouts using iBeacons.   While a lot of new trends and opportunities are opening up in the wearable technology space, there is one simple fact that will be key for this technology to move from a few experimental low volume products to mass market. This make-it-or-break-it element is that consumers want wearable devices to be such a seamless experience that they can forget they are even wearing it. They look for devices that are unobtrusive and blend into the fabric of the physical appearance.  Achieving this seamlessness is still a way away. A couple of technical challenges that stand in the way of many of these futuristic ideas are the limiting battery life and circuit shrinkage. But both of these aspects will inevitably improve over time and allow manufacturers to integrate them into their wearable devices. Wearable technology may not take off as quickly as some are expecting. But, if the above points are addressed, wearables will be on the rise, which means they could be on their way to the enterprise.   - Authored by Sachidananda K, Mistral Solutions

People are now interested in tracking their health as proven by the success of the Nike FuelBand and Fitbit. In fact, a recent survey suggests that 75% of Americans believe that wearables will positively impact their health. While activity trackers may be good for your waist, they can kill the perfect outfit. Wellograph , a stylish wellness watch, wants to correct this.     Wellograph wants to create an activity tracker that you will want to wear proudly to an important business meeting or a first date. And it's doing this with a keen eye for design and the selection of the right materials.   Wellograph president Nick Warnock told Designers of Things that the current design presented at CES this past year was a result of 15 to 20 iterations. He believes that Wellograph stands out from what is becoming a crowded wearable health space because the Wellograph is a stylish piece of jewelry and not “a piece of plastic you wear on your wrist, arm, or head.”   The Wellograph wellness watch is the first wearable to be made with sapphire crystal. This material is stronger than steel and can only be scratched by diamonds. Warnock believes the smartphone industry will shift to sapphire crystal, citing the recent news of Apple’s sapphire crystal plant in Arizona.   Unlike other activity trackers that just track activity, Wellograph monitors your heart rate, which means that it has the ability to calculate calories burned and measure your aerobic fitness. For Warnock this means that Wellograph better measures your complete health rather than just steps.   But the target audience for the wellness watch is not the pro athlete. Warnock explained that he expects Wellograph on the wrists of the working professional who wants to keep tabs on his health while wearing an accessory for status or to add to his sense of style.   The Wellograph works independent of a smartphone. It can store up to four months of data, and all of the data collection and visualizations do not required a connection. But Wellograph will be launching companion apps for iOS, Android, and Windows 8.1 smartphones, which will let users store and dig deeper into the metrics gathered by the watch.   Wellograph is currently accepting pre-orders for its device for Rs.21,151.52 ($349). It comes in black chrome and silver satin. The company is making only 10,000 available in its first run.

  The market for the wearable devices is estimated to reach $19 billion in the next 5 years. We are already seeing the biggies like Google and Samsung launching several innovative products in this space and others like Microsoft and APPLE making large investments in this segment.  We are also seeing other products like the crowd funded Pebble Smartwatch.   The beauty of this development is that it’s just not confined to one section of the users but is all pervasive like what laptops and computers used to be for the earlier generation. While Google and Samsung are announcing consumer focused products, the likes of Motorola solutions is doing it for the Industrial segment and Microsoft is investing in this area presumably for the gaming and mobile technologies.   Rewinding a little, the first wearable computer was the calculator watch introduced in 1980 and even Bluetooth headsets of the 90’s and early 2000’s. But today, what has truly caught the imagination of everyone is the latest trend in the wearable technology including the smart watches, wearable computers and the hands-free, voice activated head mounted computers that can be used by a lineman checking the electrical lines on top of a 100 meter pole, to a Doctor performing a complex neurosurgery to a fire fighter or an industrial workers doing machinery repair. The sheer vastness of the usage and the range of wearable computers available are just amazing.   Expanding the scope further for professional applications like some of the usage scenarios discussed earlier, these devices will be the next generation productivity tools providing connectivity and accessibility to expert advice/virtual presence resulting in large cost and time savings.   Taking a peep at the platform used to building these devices, we can see that majority of today’s smart devices are built around the traditional dual or quad core SoCs which is same as today’s smart phones. In addition, integration of radios like Bluetooth, WLAN and GPS is imperative for these smart devices. This along with a host of sensors like camera sensor, Proximity sensor, Ambient light sensor, Thermal sensor, Accelerometer and Gyroscope and integration of speech recognition, gesture recognition and video streaming is required to make these devices truly an extension of our physical self. Devices which are used by professionals for industrial applications also need to have the  backend integrated with a server and cloud to provide access to professional information and features like real time video chat, video streaming to remote locations etc.   Looking at these devices themselves, a question to be asked is, do we require such heavy duty, high power silicon commonly used in cell phones tablets to be integrated in the wearable devices? It’s not just the bulky batteries that can’t be accommodated in the small wearable devices.  The heat and radiation emitted by traditional cellular devices also needs to be eliminated from the wearable devices. As these devices are going to be in contact with the user for extended periods of time (8 hours+), it is very important to ensure that the radiation the heat emission is reduced to levels that will not affect our brain or other body parts. So how do we do that?   The situation is similar to when we were using processors in PCs for the first generation of embedded devices till we came up with SoCs exclusively for embedded products.  We will have to reinvent all over again!!! Just like we developed the electronic components SoCs, middleware and software applications for mobile devices, we will have to address the wearable devices market which will open up huge opportunities for early starters with the right ideas.     By, Srinivas Panapakam General  Manager – Product Engineering Services Division Mistral Solutions, Bangalore http://www.linkedin.com/in/srinipanapakam