Creative Connectivity

Bluetooth Covid Contact-Tracing Apps

In the previous article I looked at the tools the UK Government has available to deal with the coronavirus pandemic. Essentially, they have two. The first is to increase the number of ventilators and ICU beds, which gives more people with severe respiratory infections a chance to recover. That means that doctors and politicians can avoid the unpleasant choice of deciding who gets treated and who does not, but only if the number of infections are curtailed in the first place, so that we don’t run out of ventilators.

The second is the lockdown tool. It is currently a crude On/Off switch, which limits infections by keeping everyone at home. At the moment, it’s not flexible – you’re either locked down, or you’re not, unless you’re a key worker or in an essential industry. The hope is that few key workers will be infected, either because they have sufficient Personal Protection Equipment, or they’re able to social distance whilst doing their jobs. Everyone else has to stay at home. A lucky few can continue to work, but most are either furloughed or become unemployed, putting the economy in stasis.

The Government, quite rightly, is desperate to find ways to ease the lockdown. The question is how to do that without immediately seeing infection rates rise?

The flavour of the day is to roll out smartphone apps which can trace whether you have come into contact with someone else who is infected. The theory goes that if you do, you can be alerted and stay at home until you’re tested. If you have coronavirus, you self-isolate. If you don’t, you’re free to go back to work. Like many proposals for phone apps, it sounds simple, which is why it’s so appealing. Particularly to people like Matt Hancock, who has always had a bit of a penchant for phone apps, which he believes will save the NHS. What nobody is mentioning, is that for contact-tracing to work, we will need the ability to provide at least half a million additional tests that can be administered at home every day.

Understanding the Lockdown Exit Strategy

In the UK we’re about to enter a further three weeks of lockdown. There’s growing pressure from Keir Starmer, the Labour Party’s new leader, for the Government to explain how we exit that lockdown. A lot of people are looking to technology to answer that, largely in the form of tracking applications. This article was going to be about how well that approach might work, until I remembered that it’s a good idea to understand the problem before trying to solve it. I’ll go into the details of contact tracking and tracing in my next article, but first we need to look at some history to see why we need it.

Statista, a German online analytics portal, has just published the above graphic, demonstrating better than anything else I’ve seen, exactly why we need to keep away from each other. I would urge you to share it with as many people as possible. The full link is https://www.statista.com/chart/21198/effect-of-social-distancing-signer-lab/. It’s pretty simple maths behind it, but that seems to be lost on most people.

Coronavirus – The UK’s Ventilator Exit Strategy

As the UK moves towards a more major lockdown, it’s becoming apparent that this will not be a short-term disruption. Imperial College have published their modelling plans, on which the UK strategy has been based and it’s clear there is no quick fix. The Coronacrisis looks set to be with us for the next twelve to eighteen months.

It’s a hundred years since the Spanish flu pandemic, for which society had no medical solution. The result was that millions died around the world, as the best that medical science could do was to alleviate the symptoms of the dying. Since then, medical science has progressed to the point that people expect it to save them this time around. The unfortunate truth is that we have no drugs or vaccine available and it will probably be eighteen months before we do. Until then, all we can do to limit the spread is suppression, i.e. keeping people apart to reduce the number of infections.

Where we have made advances is in the technology to treat those who progress to secondary infections which are resulting in the death toll. Again, we have no pharmaceutical cure, but we can use ventilators on Intensive Care Units which can save many patients. Not all, as anyone with underlying health issues is likely to succumb. The following chart, based on US stats from Statista shows the percentage of patients who need intensive care after hospital admission, broken down for different age ranges. It also shows the mortality rate. If you are young or healthy, ventilators have a big effect on survival rate.

Hearables market to reach $80 billion in 2025

Who could have guessed, back in 2014, that a Kickstarter campaign would lead to an $80 billion market segment in just over a decade? But that’s what is happening with hearables, where a new report predicts that it will reach that size in 2025.

The growth of earbuds, which are now the “must-have” hearable for around 80 million users, has turned into the fastest growing consumer electronics product sector ever, eclipsing even the iPhone. That growth is set to accelerate even more with the launch of a new Bluetooth LE Audio standard at CES 2020, which allows designers even more freedom, higher quality and new audio applications.

It all started when Bragi managed to raise almost $3.4m dollars for a new concept – a set of stereo earbuds which could stream music as well as measuring your vital signs. A raft of other startups managed to raise over $50 million in crowdfunding investment between them before Apple arrived with their AirPods, and the rest is history.

Will Amazon’s Echo Buds challenge Apple’s Airpods?

In the five and a half years since I coined the term “Hearables” the market has grown at an amazing rate. At the time I estimated that the market for the things we put in our ears might grow to $7.6 billion in 2018. I think it just nudged over that to reach $7.8 billion. What I hadn’t anticipated was the success of Apple’s Airpods, which are driving adoption even faster, more or less doubling their sales volume every year. With the recent launch of Amazon’s Echo Buds, which could attract a new audience with the promise of a life which is “Always Alexa”, as well as the availability of a growing number of Bluetooth enabled hearing aids, the market looks as if it could reach $22 billion in 2020.

Hearables had a slow start. Although Apple probably started its Airpod design project as far back as 2013, the first thing that the public saw was Bragi’s Kickstarter campaign for their Dash earbuds. In March 2014, the Dash became famous as the most heavily funded Kickstarter project, raising $3.4 million. Another crowdfunded startup – Earin, beat them to market by a few months, but Bragi eventually got the Dash out in February 2016. In that first year of hearables, (or the first fifty-one weeks, as Apple finally started shipping Airpods in the last week of the year), global shipments from all manufacturers were probably not much more than 100,000 units, most of which were the early MFI compliant Bluetooth hearing aids. In that last week of 2016, Apple probably sold more Airpods than the rest of the industry had shipped through the course of the year. Four years on from that humble start, 2019 will probably see 75 million sets of hearables shipped. That makes hearables the fastest growing tech product ever.