Creative Connectivity

Will you still text me, will you connect me, when I’m sixty four?

Now that the networks are growing out of their teens, is it time for them to think about a market they’ve largely ignored? Given the current pain that they are suffering from the youth segment’s bandwidth-obese usage of their “eat all you can consume” data plans, you’d think that they might want attract a target audience that offers the prospect of a more reliable revenue stream.

There’s an important conference coming up in London on 26th October that promises to address the issues that have limited success so far – Mobile Phones for the Senior Market. It’s important because there are some fundamental lessons to be learned and things that need to be changed if the networks are to approach the older generation with the same degree of attention that they currently lavishing on their twenty-something users. The resulting challenges need to be addressed, not just by the networks, but also by product designers and retailers.

The mobile phone business is now the largest volume segment of the consumer goods industry. Despite that achievement, it is an industry that is still remarkably young. It’s debatable whether it is actually mature enough to have addressed real segmentation yet – instead it’s still at the stage of development where it tends to concentrate most on customers of its own age – late teens. That could be a costly mistake. By ignoring the specific needs of older users, the mobile industry is missing a major market.

Chip Jenga – Playing with Scotland’s Health

Every August I spend a couple of weeks at the Edinburgh Festival, taking in the best Arts festival in the world. There’s not much to learn about healthcare amongst the 2,000 different productions, but it’s an interesting opportunity to look around the City to see how healthcare initiatives in Scotland are developing.

Scotland is an interesting country in terms of health, as it contains a number of anomalies. At one end of the spectrum it boasts some of the best examples of Telecare and Assisted Living practice anywhere in the world. In the middle are some excellent preventative initiatives. And at the other end it has issues with lifestyle and diet that are propelling its population towards an increasingly unhealthy future

The issue of diet is a long-standing one that starts at an early age. Whereas England is embracing chefs like Jamie Oliver who are leading high profile campaigns to improve the quality of school meals, Scotland largely ignores them. If you’re in Scotland at lunch time, you’ll see queues of school kids outside the local chippies and bakers downing their daily intake of carbohydrates as they start on the route to weight related health problems. For most, lunchtime means a trip to the local obesiary, which is typically Greggs – the chain of bakers who feed a large percentage of the population.

Usability through Dance

It’s August, so I’m doing what I do every year and spending a couple of weeks at the Edinburgh Festival, seeing as many shows as I can manage. It’s rare to see much that says anything about technology or design, but this year I was blown away by a show that should be compulsory viewing for anyone concerned with product design. Even more surprising is the fact that it was a dance piece.

ME (Mobile/Evolution), written and performed by Claire Cunnigham is about crutches. Since a bicycle accident at the age of fourteen she has been using crutches. Four years ago she took up dance and since then has rapidly gained fame as a disabled performer. I should add that, having seen her, the adjective disabled seems utterly inappropriate, as what she manages to do far surpasses most people’s physical capabilities.

FDA – mHealth’s Angel or Demon?

In the rush to get a chunk of Obama’s healthcare billions, any industry with the slightest idea about remote healthcare is doing their best to claim that they are the rightful recipient of the cash. The latest of these is the CTIA, who recently held a policy forum featuring medical experts and government officials. In it they touted the promise of mobile health applications that would drive down costs and improve the quality of care. They admitted that they didn’t have a policy yet, but they certainly want a chunk of the action for their members when the $19 billion dollar treasure chest is opened. They’re not alone, but amongst all of the feverish lobbying going on in Washington there seems to be a total neglect of the role of the FDA. Instead there’s a general opinion that a good PowerPoint and drinks for enough politicians will overrule any regulatory requirements.

mHealth has been (and still is) a long time in coming. There’s a whole host of reasons for that. It’s trying to grow up in a room full of 800 pound gorillas, amongst them technology, resistance from the medical profession and a lack of standards. But hiding behind the visible 800 pounders is the big brother of invisible gorillas – the Food and Drugs Administration, fondly know as the FDA.

The FDA is responsible for regulating medical devices and services in the U.S. If they say a product or service can’t be offered, then it’s effectively dead. It provides a barrier to entry for manufacturers and services in the medical and health arena. So far, it’s had little to say about many of the visions of the mHealth industry, but there is no doubt that it will. I recently saw a presentation that outlines just how wide its powers and scope are. And they are wide. If the FDA enforced the most aggressive interpretation of its rules it could probably stop sales of the iPhone today.

I’m sure it won’t. This isn’t a rant against the FDA, but about the relative naivety of many of the organisations claiming to offer solutions in their quest for a part of the new healthcare pot. The future of mHealth would be far better served if organisations like the CTIA concentrated less on the high level fanfares and started engaging in informed debate about how the regulatory regime needs to change.

Who stole my mobile broadband?

Earlier this month OFCOM – the UK’s regulatory body, published a set of maps showing coverage for the five UK networks with a 3G license. If you’re one of those people who believe the network’s claims about almost universal coverage, they will come as quite a shock. Rather than a ruddy red glow of national coverage, they make the operators look more akin to a teenager in the first flushes of acne.

They come as a worrying dose of reality given the promises of Lord Carter’s Digital Britain report. Whilst 3 can claim to have something approaching the start of coverage (and I’d stress that it’s only the start of coverage), the efforts of the other four, and in particular O2 is nothing less than shameful.

There are a couple of things that make this even more concerning. The first is that the results are essentially theoretical, based on an agreed propagation model; OFCOM has yet to validate them on a large scale by checking actual reception. The report mentions that where a comparison was made with test drive data it resulted in an 8dB correction, but they don’t mention in which direction, or whether it is reflected in the maps. The second concern is that this is presumably the coverage for voice. If we look at mobile data, we know two things: a much better link budget is required to achieve decent data rates as edge effects drastically limit the effective size of the cell when multiple handsets are using it (See my earlier post and Moray Rumney’s excellent article). If these are applied to the coverage maps, the prospect for national mobile broadband looks like a pipedream.

The question is whether publication of this data will shame the networks into improving their coverage.

Energy Harvesting – The lights may be going out for ZigBee…

Every farmer knows that if they want a good harvest they need to take care where they sow their seed. One of the first principles they’ll learn is to sow the seeds on their own land, not their neighbours. So I was somewhat shocked to see the recent announcement from the ZigBee Alliance about their new Energy Harvesting profile, dubbed ZigBee Green Power. In their press release they talk about a feature set to establish a global, standard technology for self-powered devices operating through energy harvesting techniques.

There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with that as a goal. Energy harvesting’s a fascinating area of technology, which has only recently emerged from research into reality, as better generating technology is devised, along with lower power radios. It’s taken around twenty five years to come to fruition, during which companies and researchers have been actively patenting their ideas and techniques. Those patents don’t just cover the energy harvesting devices, they cover all of the parts of the chain – generating the power, converting it to a form that can be used, storing it, connecting to a radio and transmitting information. They also cover the applications, such as wireless light switches.

Hence my amazement at the naivety of the ZigBee Green Power press release. Whether or not ZigBee can come up with a specification that is able to run on a few tens of microJoules of power is irrelevant – I’m sure they can as they’ve bright people working in the specification group. What is far more important is whether or not it will be legal for anyone to ship a device that is based on it, as it will almost certainly infringe the Intellectual Property of the main stakeholders. So the press release looks like either an ill thought out, opportunistic attempt to regain some momentum, or a worrying piece of evidence that the ZigBee Alliance has lost the plot…