Posts Tagged ‘smartdevices’

Ikea’s Plan to Became a Smart Home Company

Written by Brooks Canavesi on . Posted in IoT

Even though we’ve been hearing about smart home devices for many years, most homes don’t even remotely resemble the connected vision of the future that all manufacturers of smart home devices would like to transform into mainstream reality.

Filled with interoperability landmines, plagued by security issues, and full of empty promises, the smart home market is a confusing mess of half-baked gadgets that cost too much and do too little—and Ikea would like to change that.

The Swedish furniture retailer has arguably more experience with manufacturing and selling well-designed products at affordable prices, and there are many reasons why Ikea may just be the perfect company to make our home smart.

Affordable and Easy to Use

Ikea is known for making good design affordable and accessible, and the company seems to be committed to this approach even when it comes to its smart home lineup, which for a very long time consisted only of Trådfri LEDs. Later this year, Ikea will begin selling its Fyrtur blinds in the United States at around $135. Smart blinds may seem like an odd choice for Ikea’s next smart product, but they actually make perfect sense from the business perspective.

“The smart home has been possible for some time, but there have been two major dilemmas,” says Björn Block, the head of Ikea’s Home Smart division. “It’s too complicated and too expensive. Let’s make it super easy to install and super easy to understand, at a price tag you haven’t seen before.”

All smart home products released by Ikea so far, including the Fyrtur blinds, are both affordable and easy to use, and everything indicates that the company wants to continue on this trajectory even in the future. That’s good news for Ikea’s customers because it allows them to experience what smart home technology is about without having to make a huge upfront investment.

The Trådfri LEDs, for example, work right out of the box simply by screwing into any existing lightbulb socket. Ikea even gives you a battery for the handy remote they come with. Unlike many other smart LEDs that are currently available on the market, the Trådfri LEDs give you only a few colors to choose from, and they can’t do anything else apart from illuminating your home, and that’s exactly what makes them so attractive.

Genuinely Useful

Not everyone understands what makes wireless blinds so useful, but Ikea does. The company has made blinds without strings or cords for many years now because blinds that do have strings or cords can be a risk to babies and small children.

In Europe, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents requires that new blinds must be “safe by design” or be supplied with the appropriate child safety devices installed. “This means that where there is a loop that is present, or could be created, a safety device must be installed at the point of the manufacturer. These safety devices either break under pressure, tension the cord or chain or provide the facility to store cord(s) out of reach. Professional installers must fit these devices,” states the British charity.

Wireless blinds elegantly solve the issue of child safety while being suitable even for applications where you can’t reach the blinds because they are too far up to grab. The genuine usefulness of Ikea’s smart blinds as well as the rest of its smart home lineup contrasts with countless other smart home products that are smart just for the sake of being smart.

Large Distribution Network

“Most players, including IKEA, don’t seem to have reached critical mass in smart home products because it is such a diffuse and complicated market,” says Frank Gillette, principal analyst at Forrester Research. “But their specific product approach and gigantic distribution network give them a big platform.”

The fact is that most consumers simply don’t understand the value proposition of smart home products. Even something so simple as the Trådfri LEDs may seem too involved on a website because it’s hard to convey the comforting nature of warm light or the eye-strain relieving potential of dimmable LED bulbs with words alone. But when customers can press a single button in one of Ikea’s many stores and instantly see the color temperature change and experience how it feels to relax in a room filled with warm light, they become much more likely to embrace smart home technology.

As of 2019, Ikea has over 420 stores in 52 markets, and nearly 1 billion customers pass through its doors every year. There are not many companies with similarly large distribution networks, giving Ikea a massive competitive advantage.

Conclusion

While most manufacturers of smart home devices are flooding the market with products whose value is not clearly defined, Ikea is keeping things simple, gradually expanding its lineup of affordable smart home products that address real problems and don’t require their users to rethink how they live their lives. In a world filled with smart kettles, smart trash cans, and smart hair brushes, Ikea provides a refreshing approach that might just prove to be what it takes to make the vision of connected future happen.

The State of Smart Home Technology in 2019

Written by Brooks Canavesi on . Posted in Blog, IoT

With the number of smart home devices available to consumers increasing at a rapid pace, now is a good time to take a closer look at the state of smart home technology to see whether it delivers the convenience, cost savings, and comfort we’ve been promised.

1.  The Global Smart Home Market Continues to Grow

According to a recent report published by Research and Markets, the overall smart home market is expected to grow from $76.6 billion in 2018 to $151.4 billion by 2024, at a CAGR of 12.02 percent. At seven billion devices in 2018, the connected home is the largest IoT segment, followed by industrial and connected health. The factors driving the growth of the smart home market include the need for energy-saving and low carbon emission solutions, the increasing awareness of the benefits of smart home technology, or the demand for home monitoring from remote locations, just give a few examples. While North America currently accounts for the largest share of the global smart home market, the demand for smart home devices is expected to grow at the highest rate in the Asia-Pacific region during the forecast period, thanks to its booming middle class. The State of the Connected Home report by techUK, which surveyed 1,000 UK customers, states that smart TVs are the most popular smart home products, followed by smart lighting and thermostats, smart health devices, smart security systems, and smart domestic appliances. Even though 74 percent of consumers are already familiar with smart home technology, only 37 percent find it appealing, which confirms that there’s still a lot of room for the smart home market to grow. Smart appliances are the least appealing category of smart home products, likely due to their high prices and limited usefulness.

2. Robots Are Not Just for Industrial Application

We’ve become used to seeing industrial robots assemble cars, weld unwieldy chunks of metal, and solder circuit boards with the precision and dexterity of a master craftsman and the speed of Dash from The Incredibles. In 2019, we’re starting to see robots leave the cold, metal walls of warehouses and factories and venture into our homes. Not many families are ready to spend $3,000 on the Sony Aibo, a robotic pet dog with lifelike expressions and a dynamic array of movements, or $5,500 on the Groove X companion robot pet, but the demand for sociable robots that could give comfort to the elderly is much greater. “With more and more people forced to look after loved ones, the internet of things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) can help alleviate the social care issues raised by an aging population,” argues Emanuele Angelidis, chief executive of IoT investor Breed Reply. “IoT also enables real-time remote monitoring so caregivers can keep a close and careful eye on their loved ones, while they complete other tasks like shopping, or simply go about their day-to-day lives.” Mobile robot solutions like Temi, a self-navigating personal robot with a large built-in touchscreen, makes it possible for caregivers and family members to give comfort and assistance in a way that’s not possible with a fixed camera. It’s only a matter of time before similar robots become so affordable that social care providers will be able to buy them in bulk and use them to enhance the quality of their service.

3. Emotional AI Is Getting Better

Gartner believes that by 2020 personal devices will know more about an individual’s emotional state than his or her own family. Emotion AI systems and affective computing are allowing everyday objects to detect, analyze, process and respond to people’s emotional states and moods to provide better context and a more personalized experience,” says Roberta Cozza, research director at Gartner. The aim of emotional AI is to automate objective measurement of opinions, feelings, and behaviors, and it relies on natural language processing (NLP), natural language understanding (NLU) and the detection of facial expressions of emotion to achieve its goal. Smart home devices equipped with emotional AI could prove indispensable in patient care, interacting with patients on an emotional level just like humans do and providing companionship and times of stress. At the same time, emotional AI has the potential to make smart home devices more approachable, easier to use, and, above all, more personal. Smart home assistants, such as the Amazon Echo devices and Google Home, have become very popular in recent years, and the ability to recognize the mood of the person the speaker is interacting with and respond accordingly would create many new possible use cases.

4. 802.11ax Is Coming

Labeled Wi-Fi 6 by Wi-Fi Alliance, 802.11ax is the next-generation Wi-Fi standard, and it’s expected to be the next big thing in the connected home. In 2019, there are already several 802.11ax-compatible routers to choose from, and many more will be released by the end of the year. What makes 802.11ax such a game changer is the fact that it solves the problem of Wi-Fi congestion, which plagues most households with multiple internet-connected devices trying to send and receive data at the same time, by introducing something called orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA). OFDMA is a technique for transmitting large amounts of digital data over a noisy channel, and it works by splitting the signal into multiple smaller sub-signals which are then transmitted at a lower data rate simultaneously at different frequencies. 802.11ax additionally adds uplink direction for MIMO and MU-MIMO to increase throughput, and it increases how many MU-MIMO transmissions can happen at the same time to eight, from four with 802.11ac. Although mass adoption of 802.11ax probably won’t happen until 2020, what’s important is that all major Wi-Fi chip vendors have already either announced or released 802.11ax chips. Because 802.11ax is backward compatible with previous Wi-Fi specifications, its adoption can happen gradually over time and with no negative impact on consumers.

5. True Wireless Charging Is Almost Ready for Prime Time

At the end of 2018, the Federal Communications Commission certified Energous’s WattUp technology, which can convert electricity into radio frequencies and then send the resulting energy to devices up to three feet away. “Older wireless charging technologies have received limited adoption over the past 15 years and are confined to contact-based charging only. The FCC certification of Energous’ power-at-a-distance wireless charging transmitter is a major market milestone,” says Stephen R. Rizzone, Energous president and CEO. True wireless charging is exactly what consumers have been waiting for, and it’s exactly what can make smart home devices more usable. Currently, consumers who decide to fit their homes with smart sensors, such as door and window sensors, motion sensors, water leak detectors, or smart locks, are forced to deal with the fact that such sensor can rarely last more than a year or two without a new battery. That may not be such a big deal when dealing with just a few sensors, but it’s likely that the homes of the future will be fitted with hundreds of wireless sensors and actuators, monitoring and controlling everything from temperature, proximity, water and air quality, and so much more. True wireless charging technology like Energous’s WattUp has the potential to make manual battery replacements a thing of the past, and it will likely be one of the big smart home technology stories in 2019.

Top 10 Most Important Wearable Trends in 2017

Written by Brooks Canavesi on . Posted in Blog, Mobile App Development, Technology trends

2016 was a good year for wearables.  According to data from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Wearable Device Tracker, total shipment volumes reached 19.7 million units in 1Q16, an increase of 67.2% from the 11.8 million units shipped in 1Q15. Ramon Llamas, research manager for IDC’s Wearables team, said that “the wearables market continues to mature and expand.”

Wearable devices still have a long way to go, but the technology has found its way into the hearts of consumers from around the world, who now eagerly await a new generation of products; one that will be sleeker, tighter, and more affordable than the current generation. These two meta-trends—maturation and expansion—will continue to play an important role even in 2017, as we’ll see when we go through our list of top 10 most important wearable trends in 2017.

10. Moving Beyond Smartwatches

For a long time, wearable devices were synonymous with smartwatches. Perhaps it was the influence of decades’ worth of sci-fi movies that caused the wrist to feel like the most sensible place where to put a small, sensor-equipped computer. Maybe it was our deep-rooted love for wristwatches combined with a desire to improve upon the timeless concept.

What matters now is that engineers and designers of wearables realize that our bodies offer plenty more convenient places for wearable devices, such as our fingers and feet. Nimb is a ring with an integrated panic button that can send an alert to friends and family, community members, people nearby, or emergency services. It looks like a beautiful fashion accessory, rather than a state-of-the-art piece of wearable technology, and works in a very discreet manner.

The word discreet has played an equally important role in the design of Ringly, a line of bracelets and rings that connect to smartphones via Bluetooth, effortlessly keeping track of steps, distance, and calories burned—metrics that previously required a person to wear a bulky smartwatch.

Under Armour has shown other footwear manufacturers how to design a good smart shoe capable of tracking time, cadence, duration, distance, splits, and other things in the natural way possible. Others, such as Xiaomi, followed Under Armour’s lead soon after, and we expect to see this trend continue even in 2017.

9. New Metrics

Walking a few hundred extra steps every day is a good way how to lose a few pounds of fat, but it takes much more than that to achieve happiness and balance in life. The upcoming generation of wearable devices is aware of this, and it leverages some of the scientifically proven effects of mindfulness practice on the brain to affect the structure and neural patterns in the brain.

One such device is called Feel. This smart bracelet recognized and tracks your emotions throughout the day and provides you with personalized coaching to help you achieve your emotional well-being goals. It does this by measuring responses from a variety of physiological signals sent by a person’s Autonomic Nervous System (ANS). Vinaya has similar goals, only with a greater emphasis on fashion and style, instead of science and data.

8. Project Soli

According to Google, “Project Soli is developing a new interaction sensor using radar technology. The sensor can track sub-millimeter motions at high speed and accuracy. It fits onto a chip, can be produced at scale and built into small devices and everyday objects.”

Compared to cameras, radar technology has several key advantages. It has a very high positional accuracy, allowing developers to sense the tiniest motions with utmost precision. It can also work through materials, and, above all, the whole technology fits on a single chip with no moving parts, which could break. “It’s a tiny sliver you could balance on your pinky toenail, with four antennas that provide full duplex communication for sending and receiving radar pings,” commented Hakim Raja, Soli’s lead hardware and production engineer.

With Soli, developers can borrow a language based on the metaphors we are already familiar with from physical controls and use it as a way how to interact with virtual objects and user interfaces.

7. The Ability to Power Wearables Through Motion or Body Heat

The limitations imposed by our current battery technology are at the very top of what customers complain about when it comes to modern electronic devices. Most smartphones are happy to work for two consecutive days on a single charge, and smartwatches are nothing to write home about either.

Fortunately, new ways how to generate electricity are just around the corner. “Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a new design for harvesting body heat and converting it into electricity for use in wearable electronics,” states the university in a blog post. “Wearable thermoelectric generators (TEGs) generate electricity by making use of the temperature differential between your body and the ambient air,” the university further explains.

Chinese researchers have taken the concept of TEGs and turned it into a flexible, wearable thermocell capable of producing about 0.3 µW of power at 0.7V, which is enough power for a simple e-ink display, for example. Others, such as a lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), create devices that can harvests mechanical energy from bending movements and convert it into electrical energy. As demonstrated during a fashion show in Bangkok, these technologies can be used together to develop smart fabrics that can harvest electricity from both the sunshine and the human body. Undoubtedly, they will play a central role in the design of many upcoming wearable devices.

6. Untethered Virtual Reality Experiences

Despite a substantial amount of skepticism, virtual reality headsets have become the coolest tech gift for Christmas 2016, proving to everyone that it’s here to stay and improve. One particular way how all VR experiences can instantly become more immersive is the attainment of what Jim Merrick, Qualcomm’s IoT director, calls “six degrees of freedom.” “We need to get to the couch, where people can consume content, where they already consume content, in the living room,” he argues against VR headsets that tether users to PCs. The ultimate goal is to allow users to move in a 3D space naturally. “If you step forward in the real world, you do [the same] in the virtual one.” Qualcomm’s solution is a reference headset called Qualcomm Snapdragon VR820, which relies on the incredible processing power of their Snapdragon 820 processor and a clarity of a pair of 1440 x 1440 resolution AMOLED panels that support up to 70Hz 4K video playback and a low latency of 18ms. Intel has also revealed their untethered VR and AR platform, Project Alloy. Alloy uses dual RealSense cameras to monitor location and position of objects around the user, promoting the concept of mixed reality. Other big names in the VR game are expected to demonstrate their upcoming untethered VR systems in the near future.

5. A Spiritual Successor to Pebble

One of the hottest tech news stories of the Q4 of 2016 was the acquisition of Pebble by Fitbit, an American manufacturer of fitness products designed to help users stay motivated and improve their health by tracking activity, exercise, food, weight, and sleep. Pebble’s talent and their homegrown smartwatch platform could help Fitbit better compete with Android Wear devices and high-end smartwatches from Apple. Unlike the products carrying the logo of either Google or Apple, both Pebble and Fitbit share data freely with other third-party apps and take a utilitarian approach to aesthetics. The upcoming successor to Pebble smartwatches is likely going to focus on health and fitness tracking while staying faithful to the original design philosophy, which helped Pebble rack up over $10 million in Kickstarter backings, becoming one of the biggest projects to date.

4. The Comeback of Smartglasses

In the world where the hype surrounding the initial release of Google Glass have fizzled out and morphed into skepticism about the entire concept, Snap Inc. have released an instant cult classic and single-handedly resurrected smartglasses from the ashes. Spectacles, a pair of funky video-recording sunglasses that take pictures and record video from the perspective of their wearer, removed everything that was nerdy and unappealing about Google Glass and replaced it with sheer, even if flawed, fun. After seeing the incredible success of Snap Inc’s Spectacles, other tech and sunglasses manufacturers, such as RaptorAR and Vuzix, have decided to join the party with sharply focused products. Apple is rumored to be working on a pair of smartglasses as well, so we have a lot we can look forward to in 2017.

3. Project Jacquard

“Project Jacquard makes it possible to weave touch and gesture interactivity into any textile using standard, industrial looms. Everyday objects such as clothes and furniture can be transformed into interactive surfaces,” states the team behind this amazing technology on the official website. In collaboration with their industrial partners, the creators of Project Jacquard have developed new conductive yarns that combine thin, metallic alloys with natural and synthetic yarns like cotton, polyester, or silk. These yarns are supposed to be indistinguishable from the traditional yarns that are used to produce fabrics today. When woven throughout the textile or at precise locations, Jacquard would provide manufacturers of wearable devices with a very discreet way how to capture touch and gesture data and wirelessly transmit them to mobile phones or other devices. One of the first articles of clothing that uses the technology is The Levi’s Commuter Trucker Jacket. “Jacquard allows wearers to control their mobile experience and connect to a variety of services, such as music or maps, directly from the jacket. This is especially useful when it might be difficult to use the smartphone, like when you are riding on your bike.”

2. Daydream VR

Mobile VR is seen by many as the perfect way how to experience the wonders of virtual reality, but the current technology is severely limited. On the one hand, there is Samsung Gear VR, which works only with a small number of flagship smartphones from the South Korean manufacturer. On the other hand, there is a large sea of Cardboard-compatible headsets that work with just about any Android smartphone but are limited in terms of graphical fidelity and the sense of presence they provide. Google wants to bridge this gap with Daydream, a virtual reality platform developed by Google for Android Nougat consisting of Daydream-compatible headsets, Daydream-ready smartphones, a wireless controller, and a special VR software mode that lets users use virtual reality apps, such as YouTube, Google Maps Street View, Google Play Movies & TV, and Google Photos in an immersive view. The first phone by Google, Pixel, is also the first Daydream-ready smartphone. Just like all upcoming Daydream-ready smartphones, Pixel has a crisp, low-persistence screen, ample processing power, and runs on the latest version of Google’s mobile operating system. Many manufacturers, including Samsung, LG, HTC, Asus, Xiaomi, ZTE, and Huawei, have already stated they will be making Daydream-ready phones, headsets,t and controllers. In 2017, a compatibility with Google Daydream could be a major deciding factor when buying a new smartphone; even mid-range devices are now powerful enough to satisfy most users, so extra features such as smooth, high-fidelity virtual reality, will likely play a vital role.

1.   The Rise of Hearables

We have yet to witness the first big hearable release, but the steady rise of this niche type of werable devices represents the noticeable shift toward persistent ambient computing. The same shift is represented by AI-enabled assistants like Siri, Alexa, Cortana, or the Google Assistant. Persistent ambient computing is possible, to a great extent, thanks to the recent advancements in artificial intelligence and speech recognition. The main idea behind hearables is to shrink the technology inside Amazon Echo or Google Home and fit it inside a small in-ear headphone. Some of the first hearables on the market will focus on music control and phone calls, but others have higher aspirations. For example, The Pilot is an earpiece which translates between languages “using the latest technologies in speech recognition, machine translation, and the advances of wearable technology,” as explained on the project’s Indiegogo page. The possibilities of what could be achieved in another few years with this technology are mind-bending. The rise of hearables could lead to the same fundamental shift in communication, our access to information, and our ability to cross borders and cultures as the internet did.