Two of the new wireless technologies that have come to the fore this year are high speed peer to peer connectivity and femtocells. Although they may not appear to have any obvious connection, I would argue that they do. Moreover that connection is so strong that they will end up fighting a technology war between themselves for a key customer application. That’s because they both have a major impact on the way that users transfer data between their personal devices. Today these two technologies are barely aware of each other – they’re both too busy gazing at their respective technical navels and ignoring the user requirements. Within twelve months, when they understand the real use cases they’re enabling, they may well be at each other’s throats.
Continua Health Alliance takes the bigamous route – Bluetooth and ZigBee.
After months of debate, the Continua Health Alliance finally announced its choice of wireless technology for low power medical devices. Bluetooth low energy and ZigBee have been the key antagonists in this process and today Continua decided to make it a threesome and share its bed with both partners.
Both brides proudly announced the forthcoming nuptials, Bluetooth claiming that it had been chosen as the Health Device Standard, and ZigBee pronouncing that it has been selected for the next generation standard.
Whilst most people outside the specification groups will dismiss this as irrelevant, it does have some important implications, as it presents medical device manufacturers with a dilemma – which of these two wireless standards do they choose? We’re at a point in time where we’re about to witness a new phenomenon of internet connected, consumer medical devices, which will open up the possibility of a new era of personal healthcare. If manufacturers become confused about which of two incompatible standards to use, they’ll delay their products, with a resulting delay in availability and implementation. It’s important that doesn’t happen.
Bluetooth is winning the Medical and Fitness Market
Everyone knows that Bluetooth is in their phone and their headset. What few realise is how many other products rely on it for their connectivity. Over the past few years I’ve been working with manufacturers and organisations to integrate wireless into their products, particularly in the area of healthcare and fitness. Having spoken about the current state of play at a recent conference, it struck me that most of Bluetooth’s success in this area is invisible. The reality is very different, as the recent statement from the Bluetooth SIG acknowledges – Bluetooth is present in over 20 million health and fitness devices. Market leaders like Philips, Nonin, Polar, Nintendo and Medtronics have chosen it. That’s not a arbitrary choice, but one that they’ve made for good technical reasons. To explain why, I’ve written a report about Bluetooth and the health ecosystem it is enabling. In it I cover the reasons it has achieved its current success and how it is poised to become the standard for all consumer health and fitness products. I also cover the changing health demographics to illustrate the reason we need it. To find out why, download the report – [download id=”2217″ format=”1″ ].
UK Cameraphone users select Bluetooth as their top service
Forget Apps Stores, music and the web on your phone. A recent survey by market research analyst TNS has shown that the most used service reported by UK phone users is Bluetooth.
You know a technology has moved into the mainstream when it starts appearing as a noun or an adjective (much to the annoyance of brand managers). But in the UK, Bluetooth has just done just that. We wear our Bluetooths on our ears and Bluetooth our pictures to one another. It’s nice to discover that this unofficial consensus of colloquial usage has been endorsed by real data.
Two nations divided by a common technology – the Mobile Conundrum
The phrase of “two nations divided by a common language” to describe the differences between America and the UK is generally ascribed to Bernard Shaw. Looking at a recent presentation on mHealth, it occurred to me that a very similar comment could be coined for the way we use our mobile phones.
The thought that prompted this came from a presentation by Andre Blackman on mHealth. In it he asked his North Carolina audience the question of “How many mobile phones are equipped with SMS (text) function?” The answer, which I suspect surprised a number of his audience, was “WOW – 95%”. It struck me that had I been asking a similar question in Europe, I’d have phrased it differently, probably as “When was the last phone sold which didn’t have SMS?” And I’d have been surprised to get many audience members suggesting a date any later than 2002 – ten years after the first SMS was sent.
It highlights something which I’ve been aware of for the last ten years – different countries and cultures are developing their mobile usage in different ways. Multi-mode and multi-standard phones now mean that most of us around the world have the same basic technology in our hands. Yet the way we use that and the way that our network operators promote it continues to diverge.
The Curious History of UWB
Most technologies are born and either survive or die. UWB (Ultra Wide Band) seems determined to do it differently, by constantly reincarnating itself and never quite getting there. It’s currently at another inflection point in its serendipitous life cycle and it’s not at all obvious whether it will survive this one.
I was recently reading Kurt Vonnegut’s novel The Sirens of Titan
