Archive for the ‘Sensors’ Category

Your Phone Won’t Let You Call Your Girlfriend

by Bruce Kasanoff

“Mary! I’m not kidding! Get Sarah on the line.”

“I’m sorry, Jake,” his phone replied. “That’s not a good idea right now.”

“What, are you kidding me? I can’t believe she wants to blow off our weekend in the mountains for some damn work event. All she cares about is work. Get her on the phone.”

“Your facial characteristics and tonal qualities indicate your behavior is highly unstable. Phone calls are not advised when in such a state.”

Jake stretched the phone at arm’s length. His face scrunched up. He considered tossing the phone out the window. “What the hell are you talking about?”

The phone replied calmly. It always replied calmly. It had no other program. “Jake, you’re going to lose your temper. Calm down, and then call. You enabled anger management mode, not me.”

The phone had a point. Jake knew he was a hothead. This was the longest relationship he’d had with any woman, going on two years now. If he called now, he’d lose it. Better to take a run first, chill out, then call – or just wait until they had dinner tonight. After a few beers, he’d be smiling and charming.

“You win,” he told the phone. “Pull up my exercise program, and let’s go for a run.”

“Now you’re talking,” said the phone.

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Common sense about the Milky Way, iPad and second recession

by Bruce Kasanoff 1 Comment

All rights reserved by Anton Jankovoy and Mariya Sogrina

This photo of the Milky Way as seen from Nepal stopped me in my tracks, making me forget about the iPad I was holding. I looked right through the device to the world that exists far beyond the reach of Apple, Google, or any other human creation.

We live in a strange time. If you focus on technology, science and innovation, it can seem like we are on the verge of knowing all the answers. If you focus on business, finance, politics or the human condition, it can seem like we are on the edge of a very bleak future.

Reality lies somewhere in the middle.

The world is filled with amazing possibilities, but our system for seeing the world is nearing the end of its useful life. That system is a mass production, sell-more-each-year, zero-sum mindset. It requires that some folks win, and others lose. It churns out massive amounts of waste, and it encourages us to pay more attention to stuff than to each other, or to the vast universe in which we live. The last vestiges of this system are pushing us towards a second, more devastating recession.

I say this as a suburban-dwelling capitalist. Much as I love all this stuff, there’s a persistent gnawing feeling in my gut that says: something is really broken here.

Since it’s hard to change the world based on gut instinct, I am pushing an idea called Common Sensor. It’s the notion that by deploying trillions of sensors into the world, we will begin to understand what is actually happening around us – and we will be able to make better decisions.

This wave of smaller and smaller sensors is already sweeping across the planet. You find them in phones, cars, office buildings, streets, bridges, exercise equipment, appliances, games, and even the ocean.

But it’s not the sensors that capture my attention, it’s the potential for common sense decisions that follow them. Most companies still make decisions based on the biases and gut feelings of their top managers. Most governments set policies based on insanely simplified public discussions (soundbites rule.)

The better we understand what is really happening in the world around us, the better decisions we can make.

The Milky Way photo was taken from the Annapurna Sanctuary, in the Modi Khola Valley, one of the most remote and beautiful places on Earth. I found it thanks to Zite, Flickr, my iPad, Discover Magazine, and wireless technology.

If we use technology to make us smarter, calmer, and more focused… life will be good.

If we use technology to distract us from the pain and suffering around us… life will be bad.

That’s just common sense.

Common Sens(or) about innovation

by Bruce Kasanoff

I do not know whether stocks will rise or fall this year, cannot predict the next weekend’s weather, and do know know how many months it will be before I see a decent movie.

But there is one thing I know with utter certainty: innovative companies will add sensors into nearly every product and service. In doing so, they will dramatically change every industry.

For a sneak preview of the changes to come, visit our new Common Sensor Innovators list. It contains links to over 100 companies that are disrupting health, fitness and related industries.

We use the phrase Common Sensor to stress the point that sensors will be everywhere: in planes, trains and buses; in your walls, floors, garden and neighborhood; in schools, offices and public buildings; in your clothes, on your skin, and – eventually – in our bodies.

Innovators on our list are monitoring vital signs of patients. Athletes are improving their performance by getting instant feedback, and real-time coaching. Weekend warriors get motivated by TVs that react to their pace and performance.

For example, iWalk provides prosthetic feet that react like human feet, instead of like artificial ones. Each senses the ankle’s position and forces in real time and reacts seamlessly. This significantly reduces the strain on the rest of a person’s body, and lets him or her life naturally and normally.

The list reads like science fiction, but it’s all happening now. Do not underestimate the changes underway.

USA Today on digital sensors

by Bruce Kasanoff

Earlier today, USA Today published an article that began: surveillance cameras at airports, subways, banks and other public venues are not the only devices tracking you. Inexpensive, ever-watchful digital sensors are now ubiquitous.

That’s true. But the article understates what’s happening, by not revealing the immense breadth and depth of digital sensors.

There are so many types of sensors available that even Sensors Magazine has a tough time keeping up. Here’s their online Buying Guide with links to thousands of vendors, but editor Melanie Martella admits they don’t yet have categories for some of the newer types of sensors.

To give you a general sense of the types of sensors out there, here are Sensor Magazine’s current sensor categories:

Acoustic and Audio
Chemical
Density and Specific Gravity
Displacement
Electrical and Electromagnetic
Encoders and Resolvers
Environmental
Flow
Force
Gas
Humidity and Moisture
Level
Linear Position
Orientation Position
Pressure
Proximity or Presence
Rotary Position
Safety Sensors and Switches
Security Sensors and Switches
Temperature
Tension
Tilt
Torque
Vacuum
Velocity
Vibration and Acceleration
Viscosity
Vision
Weather

Why is this important to customer experience? Because sensors enable some of the most innovative apps. The original iPhone included three sensors: an accelerometer, a proximity sensor and an ambient light sensor, and these not only made the phone seem intelligent (the display changes when you hold it up to your face or take it into a dark room), but they also powered many of the over 300,000 apps developed over the past three years.

USA Today also wrote: several developments have converged to push the monitoring of human activity far beyond what George Orwell imagined. Low-cost digital cameras, motion sensors and biometric readers are proliferating just as the cost of storing digital data is decreasing. The result: the explosion of sensor data collection and storage. Over the next couple of years, the volume of data generated by digital sensors will surpass the flow of e-mails and social-network entries combined, predicts Stephen Brobst, chief technical officer at data analytics firm Teradata. “Sensors will touch nearly every aspect of our lives,” he says.

I agree. But you don’t have two years to react. It’s happening right now. Some experts say there are already more than one trillion sensors out there. Yes, trillion. Truth is, no one knows for sure, but it’s a heck of a lot more than you would think.

Sensors enable companies to separate truth from fiction, to provide services that both dazzle and delight customers, and to build a substantial competitive advantage.

Truth from fiction: retailers can discover how customers actually move through their store, manufacturers can monitor the performance of their products in real time, and nearly any firm can better understand the needs – and actions – of its customers.

Dazzle customers: too many companies lag badly behind their smartphone-enabled customers, but the innovative use of sensors allow companies to behave in such an intelligent manner it makes customers’ jaws drop.

Competitive advantage: years ago, Red Lobster used sensors in the Gulf of Mexico to monitor changes in water temperature, which correlated with the price of shrimp and allowed the firm to maintain lower prices than its competitors.

How the X-Box Kinect tracks your moves

by Bruce Kasanoff

NPR’s Ira Flatow spoke with two Microsoft developer/managers and an NYU professor in a fascinating discussion about Kinect’s functionality and potential. In the space below, I’ve combined several observations made by Alex Kipman, Director of Incubation, Xbox at Microsoft…

KIPMAN: In our world, it’s about stepping in front of the sensor. The sensor not only tracks your full body, head to toe, but it also knows who you are. It knows the difference between you, your family and your loved ones as well as it understands your human speech and understands how we’d like to say that if you can see it, you can say it.

For the human body tracking, we had to re-think how to approach development for something of this nature. There is a reason why this level of technology or this level of innovation hasn’t really existed before. And that reason is, because if you think about it, traditional heuristic-based programming is a world of digital land. It’s zeros and ones. It’s yes and nos. It’s trues and falses.

The real world, the world of humans, the world we live in is an analog world. It’s a world where it’s not about yes and no, it’s about maybe. It’s not about black and white. It’s about gray. If you think about it, to understand and track humans – let’s just think about joints on the human body. You have several different joints. Now multiply that number by the degrees of freedom that each one of those joints has. Multiply that by the different proportions of the human body, from the kid to the adult to the slim person to the not so slim person…

So we had to transition from this old world to the new world. The new world is a world of machine learning. It’s a world where you are not writing in the sensor what it sees. You’re teaching it how it can perceive the world. Kinect has set of eyes and a set of ears. The set of eyes allow us to see the room, understand both visually and acoustically what’s going on and that goes to the 360, to the Xbox 360 where there is the equivalent of the Kinect brain.

Now, for just the human tracking part, let’s focus on that, it’s a series of sophisticated algorithms that will range in nature from computer vision to machine learning, to imaging science, to a series of other ones. The key innovation is in the machine learning. And the way that you can think about that working, it works similarly to the human brain.

If you think about, you know, when a baby’s born and you show this baby a lion and a person and you ask the baby, if it could speak, can you tell them apart? The baby would not be able to do it. Fast forward in time and ask that same baby that same question, you would have instantaneously the ability to discern the difference between a lion and a person. Why? Because it has historical data. It has learned. It has burnt the pathways in his or her brain about being able to discern that. Now, show that same baby a male and a female. It won’t be able to do it. Fast forward in time, you’ll have no problems…

So if you think about what Kinect brings to the table, it really brings a new palette, a new set of paint colors and paintbrushes around being to identify who you are and understand what your profile looks like, being able to track your full movement, your head-to-toe movement, and use your voice.

That palette, those paint colors and paintbrushes, get used by our creative game designers, both within Microsoft Game Studios as well as across the entire ecosystem. And in a way, the thing that gets the – everybody that I’ve spoken to really excited about this new palette is that it allows them to tell brand-new stories. At the end of the day, everybody here is a storyteller. And what Kinect allows you to do is tell brand-new stories that haven’t been told before.

So if you think about the fusion of being able to fundamentally understand humans and how you couple that with voice and identity, knowing who you are, what that allows you to do is create extremely personalized experiences that become significantly more emotional and immersive…

This is a shift, monumental shift, where we move the entire computer industry from this old world, where we have to understand technology, into this new world, where technology disappears and it starts more fundamentally understanding us. Now, that world starts with Xbox, with Kinect in the living room across gaming and entertainment, but it’s something that over time, that journey is something that’s a lot more pervasive than just that…

We will, sooner rather than later – and we’re already doing a lot of this – start continue to partner with academic places to make sure that this innovation does make it into academic circles, right? So we started this already with places like USC and other universities some time ago.

And now that the product has volume, we will start increasing that academic program, which we have through Microsoft Research, where at the end of the day, we’re excited about this technology. This technology really allows us to do new things, and we wanted this palette to be available to academics so that they can use the palette to create brand-new pictures we haven’t seen before.

Innovation and sensors: lessons from Apple and Intel

by Bruce Kasanoff

If you want sensors to drive innovation and revenue growth, become obsessive about diversity. Involve a broad range of people with diverse backgrounds, skills and motivations. That’s the lesson from two highly successful firms, Intel and Apple, who have taken different approaches to driving innovation with sensors. Each firm has harnessed diversity in startlingly effective ways.

The iPhone Takes an Entrepreneurial Path

One day recently in Weston, CT, 13-year-old Connor Mulcahey completed the one-billionth download at Apple’s App Store. This milestone occurred just nine months after the store opened. This success owes much to the iPhone’s sensors. In addition to its touch-sensitive screen, the iPhone has three other sensors whose seemingly simple capabilities have enabled the outpouring of innovation that filled the App Store’s digital shelves with compelling applications.

  1. An accelerometer detects movement of the iPhone itself.
  2. An ambient light sensor monitors the light levels surrounding the iPhone.
  3. A proximity sensor signals when you take the iPhone away from your ear.

In developing apps that could leverage these sensors and the iPhone’s other capabilities, Apple decided to harness the world’s entrepreneurial spirit. It launched the iPhone Development Center and invited everyone-literally-to develop apps for the iPhone. Importantly, Apple didn’t just invite people to create apps; it also created a distribution channel for them in the form of Apple’s App Store.

The result has been breathtaking.

Our guess is that no one, Apple’s executives included, anticipated just how many apps would be developed to leverage the sensors in each iPhone.

In essence, Apple brought a cool product to market and then unlocked the barn doors, to a certain extent. It allowed anyone who met their standards to develop apps and to sell them through the App Store. Apple never could have built so many apps itself. The company also didn’t insist that a business case be built for each app. Instead, it shifted the development risk to anyone who was willing to accept it. ‘If you build it, we will sell it,’ Apple told the development community. Importantly, Apple didn’t promise to market or promote each invention. It just created a meritocracy in which the most popular apps would rise to the top.

The benefit of this approach is that you engage many thousands of people who think differently. Some developers think in pictures, other in words, and others by touching things. This diversity of thought creates an incredibly broad spectrum of ideas. Click on a few of the links on the App list, and you’ll see what we mean.

If your firm makes sensors, or uses them in certain applications, odds are that you won’t spot the new ideas. When you are close to a certain technology, you know where you think it will fit well. But until you have someone look at technology with a completely fresh perspective, you can’t predict how people are ultimately going to use it.

Intel Ventures Out into the World

You have to love Intel’s tagline: today is so yesterday. It reflects the firm’s focus on constant innovation. In this regard, they set the bar very high.

Intel is looking for opportunity in healthcare, and is making sensors central to the firm’s research and product development efforts. With permission, they send teams of interdisciplinary researchers into people’s homes around the globe. These teams study how people do things like remember to take prescription medicines or how elderly individuals walk around their residences. As these teams spot unmet needs, Intel combines them with even more teams: marketers, designers, and engineers. They build and test prototypes. Then they send these prototype technologies back out into people’s homes. When the firm spots substantial opportunities, it then seeks to build an ecosystem of other organizations: companies, hospitals, universities and researchers.

All the while, Intel is bringing together cross-disciplinary teams in a manner that produces measurable results.

In recent months, Intel has announced the Continua Health Alliance, whose intent was to create interoperability standards for home healthcare, as well as the Intel Health Guide, a system designed to promote greater patient engagement and more efficient care management.

Steve Agritelley, Intel’s Director of Digital Health Product Research and Innovation says, “Cross disciplinary teams aren’t easy to manage, but it’s worth pounding through. What makes it hard is what makes it worthwhile. Each person has an entirely different worldview.

“If you can get them to find overlaps and intersections of what works, that’s where the magic is. Sometimes it works better than others. Over time, people start to understand each other’s perspectives, and it gets more productive.”

The bottom line is simple. If your firm wants to drive innovation with sensors, think diversity.

This article was originally published as a special feature at Sensors Weekly.