Showing posts with label Wearables. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Wearables. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 3, 2016

The Visible Data of the Invisible User

As the march to connect each and every noun on this planet continues with a blistering pace, the various ways, contraptions and sensors used to collect data is greatly expanding. What once was a (relatively) small collection of fitness trackers, smartwatches, thermostats, automobiles and surveillance cameras has grown into a an industry where shirts, shoes, sleeping bags and even liquor bottles want to gather your info. And most of these devices monitor silently without you even knowing. According to Ryan Matthew Pierson over at Readwrite.com, ‘The strength of IoT is in its ability to be invisible to the user.

In addition, the mad dash to simply insert a chip, beacon and software into everyday objects is slowly graduating to era where user experience, privacy and security are becoming critically important for mass adoption. In 2014 Gartner released a report saying the typical family home could have as many as 500 smart devices by 2022. The Consumer Technology Association (CTA) notes that 20% of US households now own an activity tracking wearable device, two-times the households that owned one last year. And Nielsen reported that smartphone penetration has reached 82% in the U.S.

Interacting and engaging with the customer in real time is a desire of many organizations.

From media and entertainment, to appliances, to transport technologies, to security and environmental controls, along with healthcare and fitness equipment almost every ‘thing’ around us will track something. Or as Dr. Nick Riviera sings, ‘The knee bone's connected to the something. The something's connected to the red thing. The red thing's connected to my wrist watch... Uh oh.’

And it is not only consumer items.

The Industrial IoT is helping farmers with connected tractors, soil sensors, crop health apps and the like. There are HVAC systems that are managed by sensors; Streetlights, utilities, parking and traffic in a connected city; and even sports teams are using wearable tech to gain a competitive advantage. And according to Research and Markets, wearable tech in schools is set to surge over the next 5 years.

With the IoT growth comes threats, along with resources to reduce the risks. In Gartner’s latest forecast, IoT security spending is set to nearly double between 2014 and 2018, growing from about $232 million to almost $550 million. Nearly $350 million will go into securing IoT this year alone. They also predict that there will be 6.4 billion connected devices in use worldwide this year, up 30% from 2015.

The security investment is good news since according to Spiceworks and Cox Business, the flood of IT devices entering the market does create security and privacy issues in the workplace. 84% of their survey-takers named the growing number of entry points into the network as a major concern. Number two on the list, at 70% of respondents, was insufficient security measures on the part of IoT manufacturers.

But soon we might be able to solve some of the challenges with our Brain.

There are some very smart research brains out there that have come up with a way to identify you by your brain waves with 100% accuracy. This is your Brainprint. A team of researchers at Binghamton University, recorded the brain activity of 50 people wearing an electroencephalogram headset while they looked at a series of 500 images. The pictures were designed specifically to elicit unique responses from person to person. Images included things like pizza, a boat, certain words, celebrities and so forth. They found that participants' brains reacted differently to each image, enough that a computer system was able to identify each volunteer's ‘brainprint’ with 100% accuracy.

According to researchers, brain biometrics are appealing because they are cancellable and cannot be stolen by malicious means like a fingerprint or retina scan. The results indicate that brainwaves could be used by security systems to verify a person's identity. This could be key since our personal data and pattern of life seems to be more valuable now than a silly, worthless credit card number.

Brain & Invisibility: Activate!

   << signed 'ps' in Invisible Ink

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Wednesday, April 20, 2016

You’re Getting Under My (e)-Skin

Imagine if the temporary tattoos that come in a box of Cracker Jack (if you’re lucky) had an electronic display logo that lights up when you put it on. Or a fitness tracker that you tape to yourself rather than wearing it around your wrist. Or a watch so thin that it lights the time while blending into your skin. Or even, a sensor that can be applied directly to an organ to determine health.

This is the future for electronic skin. Yup, I said it: E-Skin.

Researchers in Japan have developed an ultra-thin and ultra-stretchy material that can mimic the flexibility of human skin. Ultraflexible organic photonic skin is an organic polymer with light-emitting diodes (PLEDs) or small sheets of energy-efficient lights that are laminated right on the skin. These are intended to equip the human body with electronic components for health-monitoring and information technologies. These are transparent but when powered with electrical pulses, it’ll emit a colored light, number or letter depending on the implementation. The arrangement of PLEDs can also display more complex information. They also report that this PLED film produced less heat and consumed less power than previous e-skin samples.

The interesting thing here is that they used organic materials, added an extra layer of film to protect it from oxygen and water, so it lasted several days. Past organic efforts lasted less than a day due to air exposure. Today, non-organic materials used to make super-thin tattoo-like monitoring devices can last weeks or longer.
These advancements will only fuel the health care wearable market which is growing exponentially.

Research firm Tractica released findings from its report ‘Wearable Devices for Healthcare Markets’ that show worldwide shipments of healthcare wearables will increase from 2.5 million in 2016 to 97.6 million in 2021…or $17.8 Billion in yearly revenue. The general wearable device market will increase from 85 million units in 2015 to 559.6 million units by 2021 - a compound annual growth rate of about 37%.

If you thought the influx of data center and cloud traffic from mobile was big, just wait until all our body vitals start hitting the wire. Add that to all the other IoT initiates, like home/automotive, big data suddenly turns into ginormous data.

While we may instantly think about the fitness trackers and smartwatches that garner our bodies, the health care industry is also looking at the treatment of chronic diseases, wellness programs, remote patient monitoring and physician use. And there are other devices like posture monitors, connected wearable patches and pain management wearables that are gaining ground.

I can already hear the posture sensor barking, 'Stop Slouching!' and a pain patch that actually works instead of those menthol smelling globs – great idea!

ps

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Thursday, February 18, 2016

Wearing Emotions on Your Sleeve...Literally

Imagine if your emotions and feelings could be measured, tracked and included in a data graph.

I'm sure you've heard the saying 'wearing your heart on your sleeve' to indicate that someone expresses their emotions freely or exposes their true emotions without caution. This can be good in that you become open and vulnerable when showing your true feelings but can jade areas like composure in situations where you might be frustrated or irritated.

I tend to be fairly open with my emotions.

There are a few stories about the origin of the saying going back to the Middle Ages. Emperor Claudius II felt unattached men make better warriors so he outlawed marriage. To alleviate some of the grievances, every year during the Roman festival honoring Juno, he'd allow temporary coupling where men drew names to determine who would be their lady friend for the year. The man would wear her name on his sleeve for the festival. Around the same time, when knights performed jousting matches, they'd dedicate their match to a lovely lady of the court. By wearing her hanky around his arm, he was signaling that he was defending her honor.

And in Shakespeare's Othello, Iago confesses,
For when my outward action doth demonstrate
The native act and figure of my heart
In complement extern, ’tis not long after
But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve
For daws to peck at. I am not what I am.

Othello, Act 1, Scene 1, 61–65
Whatever the origin, humans are emotional creatures. We typically make choices based on emotion, even though we'd like to think it was a rational decision. We may try to hide our emotions as to not upset or reveal something to another person. Often called a Poker Face.

But imagine if your emotions and feelings could be measured, tracked and included in a data graph. Other than a polygraph. Daydream no more.

There are now wearables that track your emotions. This is not your father's old-skool mood ring but devices that read your current emotional state and attempts to sooth and lower stress levels by encouraging deep breaths and relaxation techniques to get you through the haze. Sensors that gather skin temperature, sweat gland activity and blood pulse along with movement gauge your activity level. From that, it generates a graph on your mobile phone so you can see when your stress levels peaked and the mood at the time. You can see real time or over the course of the day. Emotional analysis in your pocket...or sleeve if you got one of those runner's arm band things. I'm sure someone will create a shirt that has color changing sleeve threads depending on a person's emotional state. The Iagonaut.

This is not the future but today.

A Fitbit captured the moment of a broken heart during a relationship ending phone call. This man was wearing his Fitbit when the unexpected call came and his daily graph tells the whole story:


Koby (‏@iamkoby) shared his heart wrenching moment (and graph) on Twitter and it saturated the internet. The red arrow indicates the moment that the news hit him. Instantly, his heart rate jumped from 72 to 88 beats per minute and stayed high for the rest of the day. Clearly this healthy, athletic person was under duress and if you couldn't tell by the yellow peak marks, he had trouble sleeping that night. Talk about exposing your emotions with technology.

Would you share your sleeve with the world?

ps

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Wednesday, January 20, 2016

Internet of Insider Threats

Identify Yourself, You Thing!

Imagine if Ben Grimm, aka The Thing, didn’t have such distinctive characteristics like an orange rocky body, blue eyes or his battle cry, ‘It’s Clobberin’ Time!’ and had to provide a photo ID and password to prove he was a founding member of the Fantastic Four. Or if the alien in John Carpenter’s The Thing gave each infected life-form the proper credentials to come and go as they please. Today the things we call ‘Things’ are infiltrating every aspect of society but how do organizations identify, secure and determine access for the 15+ connected chips employees will soon be wearing to the office? And what business value to they bring?

Gartner refers to it as the ‘Identity of Things’ (IDoT) and an extension to identity management that encompasses all entity identities, whatever form those entities take. According to Gartner, IoT is part of the larger digital business trend transforming enterprises. It means that the business, the people/employees and the ‘things’ are all responsible in delivering business value. The critical part is the relationships between or among those participants so the business policies and procedures can reflect those relationships. Those relationships can be between a device and a human; a device and another device; a device and an application or service; or a human and an application or service.

For instance, how does the system(s) know that the wearable asking for Wi-Fi access is the one connected to your wrist? It really doesn’t since today’s Identity and Access Management (IAM) systems are typically people-based and unable to scale as more entities enter the workplace. Not to mention the complexity involved with deciding if the urine powered socks the VP is wearing gets access. The number of relationships between people and the various entities/things will grow to an almost unmanageable point. Could anyone manage a subset of the expected 50 billion devices over the next 4 years? And set policies for data sharing permissions? Not without a drastic change to how we identify and integrate these entities.

Talk about the Internet of Insider Threats. That's IoIT for those counting.

Gartner suggests that incorporating functional characteristics of existing management systems like IT Asset Management (ITAM) and Software Management Systems (SAM) within the IAM framework might aid in developing a single-system view for IoT. The current static approach of IAM doesn’t take into account the dynamic relationships, which is vital to future IAM solutions. Relationships will become as important as the concept of identity is for IAM in the IDoT, according to Gartner.

My, your, our identities are unique and have been used to verify you-are-you and based on that, give you access to certain resources, physical or digital. Now our identities are not only intertwined with the things around us but the things themselves also need to verify their identity and the relationship to ours.

I can hear the relationship woes of the future:
A: I’m in a bad relationship…
B:Bad!?! I thought you were getting along?
A:We were until access was denied.
B:What are you talking about? You guys were laughing and having a great time at dinner last night.’
A:Not my fiancé…it’s my smart-watch, smart-shoes, smart-socks, smart-shirt, smart-pants, smart-belt, smart-glasses, smart-water bottle, smart fitness tracker and smart-backpack.'
IT said, 'It’s not you, it’s me.'

ps

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Thursday, January 14, 2016

Meet the Sensors

I often write about the Internet of Things, or the soon-to-be-cliché IoT. You know, the smart-fridges, smart-cars, smart-thermostats, healthcare devices, wearables and any of those connected devices that have a sensor, gathers data and reports back to some entity. You are able to control these devices (and see the data) with mobile apps or even your own voice and gestures. They are all the rage and sitting at the top of the Gartner Hype Cycle.

But it’s all the various sensors inside those devices that are doing the actual measuring, calculating, tracking and reporting. Each has its own specialty providing specific functionality. I’ve always wondered about what’s inside some of the wearables let’s take a look at a few.

Have you ever wondered what spins the screen so you’re not looking at an upside down picture? That’s an Accelerometer. It measures orientation and movement. The iPhone was the first to use this back in 2007 and amazement ensued. It can tell the difference between running away from a charging buffalo in Yellowstone verses making faces with a chimp at the zoo. It can also tell if you’re sleeping simply by the fact that you haven’t moved for a while. These are typically used to track step count and how well you’ve rested.

I noted that the accelerometer measures step count but what about those steps up a flight of stairs? Well, that would be the Altimeter. Altimeters measure altitude so it can sense changes in height. In conjunction with the steps the accelerometer counted, the altimeter will add its bits and give you a more accurate calorie count for those fire escape runs. Instead of asking how tall someone is, next time ask ‘What’s your alti?’

And if you’re going to step out for a run, you might want to know if it’ll be sunny or sprinkles during the trek. Often seen as a smaller dial on an outdoor clock but now on wristbands, a Barometer measures atmospheric pressure – the weight of air in the Earth’s atmosphere. It’s used in forecasting the weather and you often hear meteorologists note, ‘There’s a high ridge of atmospheric pressure keeping the rain away.’ At least that’s what they’ve been saying in California about the drought.

So you thought of attempting an Iron Man competition but wondered if your device could differentiate between the swimming, biking and running. You’re in luck if your device has a Gyroscope. Using the Earth’s gravity, it can help determine orientation. The big difference between an accelerometer and a gyroscope is that a gyroscope can also measure rotation or more specifically, the rate of rotation around a particular axis. Gyroscopes take into account the Earth’s gravity and rotation while the accelerometer does not.

If tracking stars for navigation and location like the early Polynesians is not your style, then the ever popular GPS is your tool. Using three satellites to ‘triangulate’ your location, the receiver measures distance to the first satellite. Based on that, you are in a certain sphere location on the planet. It then measures the distance to the second satellite to get another sphere location. Therefore, you must be somewhere on the circle where these two spheres intersect. By using a third satellite reading, the sphere that cuts through the circle of the intersection of the first two spheres narrows your location even more. Now our position is narrowed to two points in space. One of those two points is so absurd and instantly tossed, thus leaving you with an exact location.

There are a bunch of other sensors like Optical Heart Rate Monitors, typically worn on the wrist and it shines a tiny light against your skin to measure the blood pumping through your arm veins. And the various Gesture Tech things that use a little camera to see your hand and body movements to translate that into action on a gaming device, or a drone following your Snake River Canyon jump or even turning up the volume on the TV. It’d be cool to move something out of the way by effortlessly swiping your hand in the air, huh?

Sensors have been all around us for a while but now they are becoming close confidants. We should get to know our new Ohana.

ps

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Wednesday, January 6, 2016

You Are the Device in 2016

… and the controller and data generator.


Were you surprised with that new car in your driveway sporting a huge bow this holiday season? Yea, me neither. But we did get a new gaming console that doesn’t require you to hold a controller in your hand. You know The One. It has a camera that picks up your body movements and turns that into action on your screen. It’ll even scan your face and create a digitized, animated You right in front of your eyes. You can then choose your You to play games. Now I realize some of you have had these for several years but we’ve been stuck in 2010 at our house…at least with gaming consoles.
For 2016, You are now the device, controller and data generator.

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is this week and plenty of new gadgets are being unveiled to interact with our lives.

Starting at the bottom, smart shoes might be the next big thing to hit stores this year. According to the manufacturer, you’ll be able to control the temperature of the shoe with a mobile app and it’ll count your steps more accurately than the thing you wear on your wrist or carry in your pocket. The temperature control idea is interesting since one of the ways to stay comfortable in the summer heat is to keep your feet cool. There’s also self-lacing shoes on display. A fitness company also unboxed smart footwear that tracks time and date, duration, distance and splits, without a runner having to carry other devices.

As we move up the body, a smart belt called Belty is grabbing people’s attention. Like any other belt, it fits through your pant loops but the motorized insides will adjust loose when sitting and tighten up when you stand. You can also have it vibrate to remind you to stand every so often if you’re on your bottom too long. It keeps track, via a smartphone app, not only of your steps but also your expanding or diminishing waistline over time. Will it shame you come next Thanksgiving? Maybe not, but the sounds and sights of a roomful people unhinging their pants after a big meal might become an era gone by.

There are also new fitness trackers, smart shirts, smartwatches, gesture controlled cars, grocery shopping fridges, and even a digital laser hair treatment that you put on your scalp for 90 seconds every night and the company claims that it’ll restore thinning hair.

Home hubs will be built into smart televisions and fridge cams will allow you to see if the light really goes out when you close the door. Sensors in our society have become commonplace and while in the past they’ve been used to track weather, traffic conditions and how much we weigh, they are now attached to our bodies gathering information about us and reporting back.

Forget about BYOD, we’re back to the old, ever popular BYOB – Bring Your Own Body.

ps

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Wednesday, December 9, 2015

The Top 10, Top 10 Predictions for 2016

The time of year when crystal balls get a viewing and many pundits put out their annual predictions for the coming year. Rather than thinking up my own, I figured I’d regurgitate what many others are expecting to happen.

7 Future Predictions for the Internet of Things – IoT is one of the hottest terms and trends. From connected cars, homes, businesses and more, connected devices are becoming more prevalent in our lives. Stable Kernel looks at the future economic growth, development of smart cities, wearables, privacy challenges and how voice commands will become the norm.

Top 10 Humanoid Robots Designed To Match Human Capabilities And Emotions – While once a dream of The Jetsons, companion robots in the home will become as common as pets, even if the pet is a robot. WT VOX explores whether robots could fully replace humans by 2045 as some predict and takes a look at the top 10 that are starting to match human capability.

The top security threats of 2016 – ZDNet digs into McAfee's 2016 cybersecurity threat report covering areas like hardware, ransomware, cloud services, connected cars and the warehouses of stolen data. From the Ashley Madison hack, to Jeeps taken off-road and the TalkTalk breach, digital infiltration is now a daily occurrence and no one is immune.

Forrester’s top 10 predictions for business in 2016 — and what they mean for tech – Computerworld summarizes Forrester’s top 10 predictions and how 2016 will be the year that the companies that thrive will be those advancing down the customer obsession path. They look at critical business issues like loyalty, analytics, personalization and how privacy will become a value to which customers will respond. You need to live a customer-obsessed operating model to survive.

IBM predicts tech world of 2016 – At number 5, IBM has published its 6th annual Five in Five - where it predicts five innovations that will change all of our lives in the next five years, with mind-reading machines apparently set to be interpreting our thoughts by 2016. From generating our own energy to no more passwords to almost everyone having some sort of mobile technology, IBM Labs is exploring these emerging technologies.

DDoS Predictions for 2016, IBM Insights – Also from Big Blue, they are sharing insight into new types of DDoS attacks that are to be expected during the coming year. DDoS is no longer a nagging problem but a bona fide technique to disable a company’s resources. BitTorrent, malicious JavaScript and Temporal Lensing DDoS (pdf) attacks are all explained. As I’ve mentioned before, there have always been protesters and activists - some write letters, some picket on the sidewalk, some throw rocks and with the advent of the internet, now you can protest (and more) by creating digital havoc.

5 IT industry predictions for 2016 from Forrester and IDC – CIO.com hits on the 2016 predictions of IDC and Forrester, two of the largest analyst firms. In their distillation, there could be a bleak future for legacy vendors since according to IDC, ‘by 2020, more than 30 percent of the IT vendors will not exist as we know them today.’ There will also be some cloud consolidation, big data gets even bigger and traditional enterprises will turn into software companies. Software developers will become a scarce commodity.

IDC Software Licensing and Pricing Predictions 2016: Top 10 Predictions – And speaking of software, Amy Konary of IDC writes about focus areas like the growth of subscription and outcomes-based pricing, the real cost of licensing complexity, usage models in IoT, the business model impacts of the convergence of cloud, mobile, social, and big data technologies.

10+1 Commandments For Companies Developing Wearable Health Trackers – Many of us will be getting a wearable or two this holiday season so ScienceRoll rolled up it’s 10+1 commandments every company developing wearable health trackers should follow. Practical value, online communities, long live batteries and gamification are what user’s desire. We know you want to make money but focus on helping people live a healthier life.

In-depth: Top 10 Internet of Things companies to watch – We started with IoT and figured I’d caboose this with another. RCRWireless digs in to the top players in both Industrial IoT and Consumer IoT. Many of the names are familiar: Cisco, IBM, ATT, Google, GE, Samsung and a few others are already hedging their future on all these connected nouns. See what these organizations are doing both internally and externally to embrace IoT and take advantage of this proposed multi-trillion dollar market opportunity.

And if you want to see if any of the previous year’s predictions came true, here ya go:

ps

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Wednesday, December 2, 2015

Arguing with Things

As more things get connected, we may find ourselves disagreeing with them.

We all argue, especially if you’re passionate about something. Sometimes it’s with our spouse, sometimes with friends or co-workers and sometimes we scold objects that aren’t doing what we want them to do, ‘Ah, come on pen…don’t run out of ink now!!’ As more of these things get connected and are interacting with us, will you find yourself arguing with inanimate objects even more?

echoThe other day I was talking to my wife about Alexa (the Amazon Echo) and suddenly from the other room we hear, ‘I will add that item to the shopping cart.’ We looked at each other and simultaneously said, ‘What was that?’ with the added ‘jinx’ that quickly follows. We walked over to the device and started interrogating it as to what it just added to the cart. ‘I don’t understand the question…I can’t seem to find what you are looking for…I can’t understand what you said,’ were the various responses. These answers would drive a detective to charge it with obstructing justice. This is not a complaint against Echo mind you, we like it. It just couldn’t understand our questions until we asked the right way.

It also seems to have feelings. My daughter told it that it was stupid (for not understanding us) and Echo replied with, ‘That’s not very nice.’ M3S looked at me, looked at Alexa and then apologized to the cylinder. Not sure if she forgave us, but we’re a little more courteous around her now. Over at The Guardian, Rory Carroll experienced the same thing and he writes about how these home robots hear everything and the types of data captured by many of these home services. There are no more boundaries between home and the outside world. 

When I’m in the car and pass the intended route, the GPS keeps telling me to make my first legal U-turn, even though I know where I’m going. On a few occasions I’ve quipped, ‘Stop bossing me around!’ It ignores me and keeps reiterating that I’m going the wrong way. Tossing it in the back seat doesn’t help.

With the holiday season upon us and wish lists getting fulfilled, you may find that in 2016, your quarrels will be with gaming consoles, thermostats, fitness trackers, security cameras, refrigerators and other gadgets instead of humans.

I guess that’s better than making a scene at the dinner table.*

ps

* Except in cases where smart utensils have been deployed.

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