Creative Connectivity

Let the Wireless Wars Begin

It’s been an interesting week for the short range wireless standards. The two terrible teenagers, ANT and ZigBee have both shown signs of their growing maturity, starting to position themselves as far more serious contenders in the market place. In the wake of their move from adolescence, a new toddler has emerged in the form of Toumaz, with their announcement of their Telran chip.

What has been missing is any reaction, or in fact much sign of any action from their elder siblings – Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. As large manufacturers continue to tighten their belts, one of the less noticed effects has been a steady withdrawal of engineering support from standards organisations. In the past, many of these have been staffed with seconded experts from the big names in industry. Increasingly those big names are withdrawing, relying largely on chip vendors to push their interests within the standards organisations. That’s left Wi-Fi and Bluetooth battling to persuade industry members that either standard has a development future, with certain of their members considering that the job has been done.

Which opens up the field for the former competitors to claim some potentially interesting parts of the market.

Smart Appliances – a Dangerous Distraction for Smart Energy

Over the past six months, culminating in the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas earlier this month, there’s been a growing clamour about smart appliances and how they will fit into the smart energy ecosystem. It’s not just the technology advocates who have been selling the story; big players in the White Goods industry, like GE and LG have been out there promoting the story as well. They have a view of a connected appliance that is constantly talking to your electricity meter, their service and maintenance site, your power provider, and for all we know, a dishwasher in Korea that’s wasting its time on the machine equivalent of Facebook.

It’s a nice high-tech story, but does it make sense? You can see how it has evolved from the effort that is being put into smart grids. The theory is that to reduce the strain on generating capacity, it makes sense for energy hungry appliances in the home to adjust their start time, so that they run when there’s least demand for electricity. Hence by connecting appliances within the home to your smart meter, or your utility’s web site, they can be told when to turn on or off. Which, on the surface, makes a certain degree of sense.

But there’s another side to the story. The connected appliance doesn’t save energy – it just means that it uses the same amount of energy at a different time. The other approach is to make the appliance more energy efficient. When you look at the relative efficiencies of different products, the manufacturers who seem most enthusiastic about smart appliances are those who sell some of the least efficient ones. It makes one wonder whether their interest in connectivity is just a PR sticking plaster to cover up their poor performance. Instead of investing in research they see an easier win in investing in media techno-babble.

The problem with doing that is that the promotion of smart appliances ups the requirement specs for the smart meters and gateways that are at the core of home energy management. Rather than let the smart metering industry have a period of relative stability to confirm their technical specifications, complete trials and educate users, this new mania around connected appliances adds a level of unnecessary technical uncertainty. As such it is a very dangerous distraction to the core requirements of smart energy.

mHealth Apps need an injection of reality

If you’ve been reading the mHealth blogs and analyst reports over Christmas and the New Year, you’ll have realised that medical apps are being promoted as being the next big thing. You’d be forgiven by thinking that by 2015 we’ll have given up on conventional medicine and the only reason we’ll be going to see our GP is because GPs will replace the Apps Store as the primary source of these apps. So, if you’ve any money left after Christmas the message seems to be to go and invest it in health apps development, as that’s where the cash will be.

Although it feels a little early in the year to be contrarian, I think that the industry is running before it can walk. Do we really think doctors are ready to be start practising the mantra of “first I’ll dispense an iPhone app; if that doesn’t work I’ll give them an Android one; and if they’re still not better I’ll put them on the Symbian app – if that doesn’t cure them, nothing will. They won’t come back after that!”.

I’m not knocking innovation in health apps. As I’ve said before the industry probably needs to think more out of the box than it currently is, but there are already lots around and there will be more to come. Whether they will transform our health is another matter, as is whether anyone will make money out of them. A lot of the current thinking seems to be making unsupportable jumps and simply inflating the mHealth bubble. Let’s look at whether it makes sense…

Festive Christmas Ravioli

This year the mother-in-law’s coming over for dinner on Christmas day. The main course is fine – we’ve got the goose patiently waiting to be roasted. The desert’s already organised as Chris is the Christmas Pudding wizard of the known world. But what do we do for a starter? It’s Christmas Eve, the shops have shut and all that’s left is what’s in the freezer along with a desperate need for inspiration.

We do have lots of sprouts. And because I keep on thinking we’ve run out of pasta flour and buy more and more until we have a cupboard full of it, fresh pasta’s a distinct possibility. And what could be more festive than Brussels Sprout Ravioli? So, armed only with a pasta maker, a ready supply of alcohol and a daughter bravely taking the triple roles of photographer, glamorous assistant and general dogsbody, it seemed time to break new culinary boundaries.

And just before we started I remembered I’d also got a piece of Zebra fillet lurking somewhere in the freezer waiting for a suitable recipe. A quick search of the web revealed a shameful lack of recipes for either zebra or sprout ravioli. Time for inventive genius to put right the deficiencies of the Internet for the benefit of the gastronomically adventurous…

GE – The Appliance of Ignorance

Back in the 1980’s when they were trying to establish themselves in the British market, Zanussi ran a campaign for their products using the advertising strapline “the Appliance of Science“. I was reminded of it this week when I was reading a white paper from another appliance manufacturer – GE. Not because it had anything to do with science; in fact just the opposite – it was about the most unscientific paper I’ve ever come across.

It was written to promote GE’s view on which wireless standard should be chosen for the Home Area Network (HAN). These are designed to connect devices around the home to a smart meter or a home gateway that has access to information about your current energy tariffs. GE thinks the best choice should be ZigBee because “ZigBee is better than Wi-Fi”. One of the paper’s authors is an active editor for the ZigBee Alliance Smart Energy Profile, so that’s not surprising – he’s entitled to be enthusiastic about the technology he’s part of. And it may be that ZigBee is a good choice. But GE’s analysis doesn’t provide any evidence as to why it might be. Instead it provides an evidence-free quasi-analysis that does ZigBee more harm than good.

We’ve had a year of hype as different wireless standards vie for the crown of being chosen as the de facto one for smart metering. Much of that obscured the facts which need to be considered to make that choice. In the last few months I thought the industry had settled down and was beginning to a bit more logical. This rant from GE suggests that some of those involved in the debate still have a lot to learn. If you want to see how not to make a reasoned argument, download and read the GE white paper. I’ll highlight what is so wrong about it.

Mobile Health needs some Medical Pornography

If you’ve been working in Mobile Health or telecare, you’re probably frustrated by the slow progress being made in bringing products to market. Whilst analysts like research2guidance see a rosy future, more down to earth reviews, such as the recent 2020health report “Healthcare without walls: Delivering telehealth at scale”, and Frost & Sullivan’s “E- Healthcare Initiatives in the United Kingdom” continue to point out that very few projects have scaled up past a few tens of users.

Many reasons are put forward for that, ranging from the natural inertia of the medical industry, the barriers imposed by regulators, through to the difficulty in persuading doctors to hand over disease management to their patients.

Technology has been blamed in the past, but that’s no longer a valid reason. Over recent years there have been major advances in sensors, wireless connectivity and processing power. We certainly don’t have solutions to every problem, but there is a wide range of conditions where mHealth could provide significant benefits. So what’s holding it back?

Next week the Mobile Health Industry Review at the King’s Fund in London will be bringing experts and VCs together to talk about business models. I’ll be suggesting that mHealth isn’t the first industry to have suffered from this phenomenon. Even for disruptive technologies, it often needs an unexpected and sometimes even unconnected industry to invent and develop a new application in order to drive things to a point where the disruption can be taken up and embraced by others. One of the classic cases is the Internet. Much of the development of streaming, payment mechanisms and user interface was driven by the porn industry. Once that work was done, it was adopted by others, giving us the e-commerce, video streaming and compelling content that we now expect from every site.

So, if Mobile Health is going to get anywhere it probably needs to follow the same course and forget about conventional medical thinking, (which generally involves a doctor), and embrace some more disruptive models. To put it more bluntly, we need to find out what the equivalent of pornography is for healthcare.