Creative Connectivity

Wi-Fi Direct and Bluetooth – battle to the death?

The media lapped up the recent press release from the Wi-Fi Alliance, announcing the birth of Wi-Fi Direct. Almost to a man, they decided once again that it would kill Bluetooth. I suspect that Bluetooth will prove to have something in common with Mark Twain, being able to sit back and calmly repeat that “the report of my death is an exaggeration”.

For many of the reports, that analysis seems to be based on little more than the relative number of press releases that the two organisations send out. For some reason known only to itself, the Bluetooth SIG is remarkably reticent about publicising its technology, preferring to sit quietly on its laurels of shipments of over a billion chips per year (1,050 million in 2008 – IMS). Wi-Fi tends to be more vociferous about its plans, possibly stung by the fact that it manages to ship only just over a third of that (387 million in 2008 – Instat). As is often the case with young pretenders, noise can be rather more noticeable than actions. (Incidentally, no other short range standard gets within an order of magnitude of the lower of these figures.)

A few articles dug down a bit more into the technology itself, and came to less of a conclusion as a result. None of them thought about what really matters, which is what the user experience will look like. So let’s do exactly that…

Bluetooth low energy – the Momentum Builds

It’s been a good week for Bluetooth low energy. At times it’s felt like a long, slow path since it was first announced as Wibree in October 2006, but that feeling is changing as the standard is coming to completion. This week saw the first Bluetooth low energy conference take place in Munich where chips vendors were showing off demos, whilst on the other side of the world, at the ARM Techcon in Santa Clara, there were more live demonstrations of the technology.

The mood of the industry has become increasingly upbeat. It was noticeable in Munich that a significant number of companies have moved from cautious interest to being serious about starting to deploy it. The questions that they are asking have changed to the practical ones of qualification and access to test equipment. That change in mood was reinforced by the Bluetooth SIG announcing that the specification is on course to be released this December.

The Bluetooth low energy standard can be confusing at first. Although it carries the name Bluetooth, it is a completely new radio with a completely new protocol stack on top of it. It has been designed from scratch to allow developers to add connectivity to products that only want to send small pieces of data on an irregular basis, but with such low power consumption that it can run on coin cells. The companies attending the Conference in Munich have understood that difference and are keen to exploit the new products and service models that Bluetooth low energy offers.

We need a Manifesto for Consumer Health and Wellness

At the Continua Health Alliance summit in Boston this week, most of the speakers are talking enthusiastically about the amount of Government momentum for reform of the healthcare system. Keynote speakers from all areas of the medical industry are telling us how things will change.

It’s not a new message, albeit it has been revitalised by the prospect of the Obama billions. The physicians believe that they can heal themselves, or at least the system they work in. So it came as a breath of fresh air to see a posting that popped into my inbox from Joe Macaluso on Real Health Reform. It argues that the only way we will see any real reform is if it’s done by patients, without the support of Congress or the medical industry.

Over in Europe, the EU is running a debate on Consumers and Health, asking for contributions to a seminar in Brussels at the end of the month. I’d been thinking about this for some time and had come to the conclusion that the most useful thing that the EU commission could do would be to look at how to change the regulatory playing field. That’s necessary to let patient-based groups start to take healthcare and even prescribing into their own hands. To achieve that I think we need a Manifesto for Consumer Health, that provides a safe environment for disruptive developments. By coincidence I’d just finished writing my thoughts on that, which I was posting to the EU Consumers and Health site as Joe’s mail came in. After reading Joe’s post, I’ve added a poll asking “Whether you believe that healthcare reform needs to be driven by patients, rather than medics or legislators?” Please go and vote – I’ll post the result in a later blog.

So why do I think we need a manifesto..?

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.