Wearable Tech and the Internet of Things (Iot)

The fact that Apple Watch is designed to be used alongside an iPhone raises another important consideration – your users will not experience your application in isolation on a single a device. They will likely pick and choose the device to interact with, moving from one to another, to meet their needs at a given point in time.  -  As such, it becomes really important to think about system-based design – that is, spending time up-front on a project, considering all the different touch points that your users will engage with your application, and creating a set of related experiences that are clearly designed as one, but that take advantage of and are contextual to each of the device form factors.

Smartwatches shift existing technology to a new location – from the pocket to the wrist. More exciting are second-skin devices such as embeddables, ingestibles and hearables. These will include flexible technologies that blend into our skin; devices that are controlled by eye-motion sensors; and earbuds that measure and respond to our heart rate. All are part of the ongoing journey to create technology that is so deeply interwoven with our lives that it becomes almost invisible. The benefits of this transition will be better usability and genuinely groundbreaking technology that goes beyond incremental developments.

Salesforce has jumped into recent investments in wearable startups and an initiative to get developers to build applications that connect devices worn on the face, wrist and body with Salesforce’s technology.  Salesforce’s interest in wearables illustrates that in addition to being a dominant provider of business applications, the company is also a major computing platform that other developers use to access customers or actually run their own businesses, Irvine said. Wearables are just one emerging technology that will get attention at Dreamforce, and are part of Salesforce’s larger goal of capitalizing on the so-called Internet of Things, which refers to the increasing number of Internet connected devices that are spewing out unprecedented quantities of data that promise countless insights to come. - To get out front on the wearable trend, Salesforce in June launched Salesforce Wear to entice developers to create more enterprise applications for wearable devices, with support for devices from Samsung Electronics Co., Google and Pebble, among others.

Very interesting wearable - on the inside of the body, - their big issue is having to solve the contradiction of stiff and flexible, turns out it is what is known as Physical Contradiction based on time.  Numerous inventive principles for solving that problem. 

This is what we've been hoping that Wearable tech can do for oh so many people

(from the Curator of the IoT & Wearables):  A Cool video to watch on all the current tech that's worth checking out

A study into flu treatment suggests we could do away with needles, using a dissolvable patch to administer vaccines instead.  There are plenty of people out there with a fear of needles, reportedly one in five people suffer from what’s called trypanophobia.  To be honest, even the rest of us who aren’t afraid of them would still rather a situation that didn’t involve a needle being shoved into our arms.  Research by Osaka University academics in Japan that points to a future of no needles, for some cases, should be welcomed by many.

But Nakagawa used water to make the patch, and hyaluronic acid to create the needles – hyaluronic acid is something that humans naturally produce to cushion their joints.

When the patch is applied like a plaster, the needles pierce the top layer of skin without causing pain and dissolve into the body, taking the vaccine with them.   “Because the new patch is so easy to use, we believe it will be particularly effective in supporting vaccination in developing countries,” said Professor Nakagawa, professor of biotechnology and therapeutics at Osaka University. By testing the patches with flu vaccines, the results seemed positive, with results showing that patients had at least as much a reaction as those treated traditionally — the paper doesn’t detail who, of those treated, subsequently got the flu.

Identity, control, safety – these are the three areas where wearable technology will evolve in its next generation, according to Sonny VU, CEO of wearables company Misfit. “Right now, in a current world of wearables, we’re still very much in a 1.0 world”, he says.”If you think about it, the use cases for wearables right …

This is an area where designers and inventors have to understand the exact needs of the person using their product. 

• How can a partially sighted skier be more independent?
• How can you make it easier for a wheelchair rugby player to right themselves after a fall?
• These are the kinds of questions that students at Imperial College London have been trying to answer as part of the Rio Tinto Sports Innovation Challenge.
• These prototypes could play an important role in the future of technology for disabled sportsmen and women.
• Currently, blind or partially sighted skiers rely on guides who ski in front of them. They are linked through Bluetooth headsets.

The company is only providing the basic technology, not finished products, so it'll be a while before you see this smart cloth in something you can buy.  

Good use case development 

..."in a not-very-well-concealed attempt to steal away  publicity from Samsung's Gear product line , Google just announced that next week it's selling a limited number of its "Glass" devices to the US public. Previously, Glass was only available to a select group of volunteers called "explorers". -  Told you the Silicon Wars were on and the hunt is on to crack the code of wearable tech continues -  Gotta love it 

We really like Galileo, it has Quark on it, and this is purpose built for the DIY crowd, we think this is very smart move on Intel's part, essentially creating an open innovation platform for all to use.  

And according to my sources the pet project of the CEO Brian Krzanich apparently with much resistance internally to go do it initially,.  

To us at the S+IG this is an easy to place bet, in fact plain smart, who else has one out there?  No one.  which demonstrates vision where others have not, and commitment to go against the grain to do the right thing and to explore options and ask the larger community to go do it.  We commend Brian Krzanich for doing this, we see this as an excellent example of setting a new standard in the IoT space..  We are reminded of our days in desktop operations when Intel built the majority of the motherboards out there, and everyone bought from Intel, and I mean everyone.  

Who else is setting a new standard that people can get behind with technology that goes all the way to the silicon level and can integrate it into a killer platform?

(from the Curator of the IoT & Wearables):  the Future of  wearables and biometrics in the travel industry, which would also have play in just aboput every other location as well