All posts tagged: wearable

The WaRP7 development board is the latest evolution of the “WearAble Reference Platform” (WaRP) development system from NXP Semiconductors – a next-generation, powerful but tiny development platform specifically aimed at the needs of advanced Internet-of-Things products and wearable computing applications.

It provides a complete, powerful ARM Cortex-A7 based embedded computer solution in a tiny form factor, with wireless connectivity, battery power, many different sensors, open-source operating systems and enough flexibility to offer all the advantages of other development tools, and it’s aimed at a range of different IoT applications and markets such as smart home and automation devices, personal devices for fitness and health monitoring and other wearable computing needs.

The WaRP7 platform includes extensive on-board connectivity and peripheral features including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, NFC, battery charging and power management on board, 8GB of onboard eMMC memory, and support for a huge range of sensors and add-on peripherals.

This system uses the MikroBus expansion socket system introduced by MikroElektronika for their microcontroller prototyping tools, allowing over 200 existing “Click” expansion modules and daughterboards to be added to the WaRP7 for easy development, hacking and rapid prototyping with a huge suite of different sensors and components.

It provides a rapid prototyping platform with pre-validated USB, NFC, Bluetooth, Bluetooth Smart and Wi-Fi connectivity, along with open-source reference OS builds and example software, providing a strong foundation that reduces the time-to-market for your IoT product development and allows product developers to focus their resources on creating their applications and the valuable, differentiating features of their product.

The motherboard is based on NXP’s i.MX 7Solo application processor, the latest in NXP’s (formerly Freescale) widely used, well-proven, Linux-ready i.MX family of processors. This i.MX7Solo system-on-chip features an ARM Cortex-A7 core as well as a Cortex-M4 core on the same chip – with the ability to easily handle both real-time microcontroller and GPIO functions along with higher-level operating systems that provide rich user experiences.

This heterogeneous multi-core architecture provides power management advantages too, allowing the system to drive a higher level operating system but also put the main processor to sleep sometimes, where it can be woken up in low-power modes by the Cortex-M4 processor.

Furthermore, the platform enables the strong energy efficiency that is critical for today’s portable and wearable IoT designs, but also strong computing power and convenient “wake-up” capability from a low-power state when it’s needed.

The platform offers a variety of connectivity and RF communications options, including NFC, 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Classic, Bluetooth 4.1 regular or Bluetooth Low Energy. Storage is covered with 8 GB eMMC for nonvolatile storage and 512 MB LPDDR3 RAM are also provided – along with built-in battery charging and power management, a MPL3115A2 barometric pressure sensor, FXAS21002C 3-axis MEMS gyroscope, and the FXOS8700CQ 3-axis accelerometer plus magnetometer.

A MIPI-DSI display port, built-in MIPI camera on the module and an audio interface are also provided, offering rich multimedia capability, and all these powerful sensors and peripherals are integrated into a tiny main board that measures only 2cm x 4cm.

This platform has been built from the ground up to address key challenges in IoT and wearable-devices engineering, including size, radio connectivity and battery life, and it is provided with a complete open-source hardware and software platform.

This includes hardware design files, operating system source code, bill of materials and all other open documentation – all of which allows developers to use this as a foundation for their product innovation without having to licence expensive proprietary IP.

Fully-featured Android and Linux operating system builds are provided, easing development effort for software developers, while also supporting extensive UI capabilities, powerful application software and connectivity stacks. All the source code is provided of course, so you do have the option of modifying the build of the open-source operating system yourself, if you need to customise it.

The WaRP7 development platform could be a powerful new player in the busy development board space, especially in wireless connectivity and wearable IoT applications where more computing power and an operating system such as Linux is required.

Its combination of tiny size, strong performance, focus on power efficiency and integration with a powerful suite of onboard peripherals – along with Linux or Android support, make it uniquely placed to offer value in a lot of different IoT and wearable application areas.

With the array of features, the WaRP7 could be the platform for your next Internet of Things product – and we’re ready to help turn your WaRP7 ideas into reality.

Here at the LX Group we have the systems in both hardware and software to make your IoT vision a success. We have end-to-end experience and demonstrated results in the entire process of IoT product development, and we’re ready to help bring your existing or new product ideas to life. Getting started is easy – click here to contact us, telephone 1800 810 124, or just keep in the loop by connecting here.

LX is an award-winning electronics design company based in Sydney, Australia. LX services include full turnkey design, electronics, hardware, software and firmware design. LX specialises in IoT embedded systems and wireless technologies design.

Published by LX Pty Ltd for itself and the LX Group of companies, including LX Design House, LX Solutions and LX Consulting, LX Innovations.

Wearable computing is in the news again, with new smart watch offerings from Samsung and others, Nike cutting back their development of wearable technology, and existing and emerging offerings such as Google Glass, the Pebble smart watch and Nike’s FuelBand fitness monitor also attracting growing interest in the media.

But can this diverse range of products from different manufacturers interoperate effectively with each other and with other devices? Are proprietary devices and protocols user friendly in wearable applications, or are open standards and interoperability between different vendors important for success of the wearable computing industry? Let’s look at the need for standards in wearable computing, and the pros and cons of open standards in the context of wearable computing.

Many companies, including smaller startups as well as major international brands such as Google and Nike are attempting to find leading positions in the emerging consumer market for wearable computing. For example MapMyFitness, a company developing an online platform for use with wearable health and fitness data-logging, is aiming to support connectivity with some 400 different devices.

Furthermore they’re one of 10 app makers partnering with Jawbone on its recently announced Up wrist-monitor platform which also aims to attract developers – and that’s just the offering from one small company in the wearable-computing market, focussing on health and fitness devices, such as heart-rate monitors and shoe-mounted exercise loggers.

This type of wearable technology accounts for one of the most rapidly growing sectors of the wearable computing market. But such interoperability with a large number of different devices assumes that open standards and protocols, such as Bluetooth Low Energy and ANT, are widely adopted across the industry.

Although some vendors such as Google are likely to have good support for open standards and strong utilisation of open-source operating systems such as Android, other industry players such as Nike or Apple are much less likely to concern themselves with openness and interoperability if they can bring a product ecosystem to market which “just works” for consumers whilst using closed, proprietary protocols and standards.

Right now, much of the data collected from wrist monitors such as Jawbone’s Up, as well as heart-rate monitors, sleep-pattern sensing devices, bicycling cyclometers and more exist in digital silos. It’s not easy to look at the different collections of data at the same time to determine, for example, if a series of poor running performances might have been related to several nights of fitful sleep.

But if open standards are used, then correlation and fusion of the data from different sources in the same place is possible, allowing more interesting conclusions to be derived from the data. Because of the size, weight, battery life and user interface constraints associated with wearable devices, such devices tend to use relatively low-power microcontrollers – not relatively powerful CPUs like those found in mobile phones, and tend to use minimalist sensors, memory and storage, meaning that each device tends to be optimised to do only one particular task and do it well, unlike general-purpose PCs or smartphones.

Although a Pebble smart watch enhances your user experience when using your smartphone, it’s not a fitness data-logging device – it’s a separate device that fulfils a different basic set of functionality. However, there is still some potential for value in interoperability and data exchange between these kinds of devices.

Wearable electronic devices of this kind can be most useful when multiple devices are combined into networks – for example, a smart watch for at-a-glance message display, a heart rate monitor and a pedometer sensor, all networked back to a central smartphone. But are the full spectrum of wearable devices that you choose to use going to all be compatible with the smartphone you use?

Samsung recently unveiled its first serious piece of wearable computing technology, the Galaxy Gear, although the device is currently only compatible with the Galaxy Note III and the third-generation Galaxy Note 10.1. Although the Sony SmartWatch 2, for example, is widely compatible with Android devices, is it likely that the rumoured Apple iWatch will offer compatibility with Android? Probably not.

On the other hand, it is likely that choosing multiple different devices from the same manufacturer – if the types of sensors and devices you want to use exist – is likely to “just work” with the best possible compatibility and reliability, even if this means promoting closed, locked-in systems and proprietary protocols which may be used. And many non-technical customers just want consumer electronics that “just works” without any real care for open standards.

Today, smart watches and fitness bands can track physical activity through the most basic metrics, such as step counting. With more sophisticated accelerometers and algorithms, devices such as the Nike FuelBand can make a guess at what kind of activity you’re actually doing.

Some devices, like the Basis watch, track heart rate. Combined with a smartphone and/or smart watch, multiple different devices like this comprise a personal, body-worn wireless sensor network of sorts – and open standards are obviously valuable in realising the true flexibility and power of such a network. You can use RunKeeper on your iPhone, for example, or Android phone or via any web browser, but you can’t get RunKeeper’s data to sync with MapMyFitness.

And if you’re using a Nike FuelBand, you can’t translate proprietary Nike “fuel points” into data that’s usable by other fitness-tracking apps. Wouldn’t it be nice if this data was openly portable and easy to integrate into other fitness applications?

Fragmentation of compatibility of hardware and software between different versions of operating systems such as Android and wearable computing devices is also an emerging concern that should be considered, to deliver the best possible user experience. A “companion app” is an application that runs on the smartphone which communicates with the smartwatch or other wearable device in a personal network. Sometimes these apps are available on both major platforms, but sometimes they aren’t.

Even if they are, it often means that a person has to purchase a version of the app for each platform. Companion apps may be increasingly going away, replaced by what amount to “plug-ins” that install into the app that runs in the device’s own app, along with a piece that’s copied onto your smart watch or other wearable device.

But this approach just creates an entirely new microclimate inside each operating system’s ecosystem, which is not ideal. Now smart watch apps must be downloaded into another app which takes care of communication between the two in a cross-platform environment, adding complexity. When we bring Samsung into the equation it gets even worse; now you’ve got to have specific hardware for the peripheral to even work! On paper it may work great, but in reality this is a user experience nightmare, and careful design for user-friendliness along with cross-platform compatibility is important here.

Privacy, of course, becomes a big concern that many people have when it comes to omnipresent wearable cameras recording video at all times, or wearable devices gathering intimate data on what your body is doing, in health or fitness datalogging applications.

At the same time as technical standards and protocols are developed and standardised, society needs to be developing and thinking about social and legal standards to deal with the new technology – to protect the privacy of health data, and to deal with the presence of omnipresent photography and recording in public spaces using devices such as Google Glass without over-the-top hatred or suspicion of the technology due to the privacy concerns.

Device manufacturers can also play a role here, in enabling public understanding and acceptance of what the technology does and does not do, and what measures are put in place to manage the data with good standards of privacy.

Nevertheless the wearable electronics market is growing, and there are many opportunities if the designer can hit the sweet spot of creating a genuinely useful and usable product. And if you have the idea, and looking for a partner to help bring that idea to a finished product – we’re ready to work with you for your success.

As experts not only embedded hardware but also full idea-to-delivery of products, our consultants and engineers can work with you to meet your goals. The first step is to join us for an obligation-free and confidential discussion about your ideas and how we can help bring them to life – click here to contact us, or telephone 1800 810 124.

Published by LX Pty Ltd for itself and the LX Group of companies, including LX Design House, LX Solutions and LX Consulting, LX Innovations.

Wearable computing – the use of personal computers, displays and sensors worn on one’s person – gives us the potential for advancement in human-computer interaction compared to traditional personal computing – for example the ability to have constant access and interaction with a computer – and the Internet, whilst going about our daily activities.

This could be considered the ultimate in multitasking – the use of your computing device at any time without interrupting your other activities. For example, the ability to read an email or retrieve required information while walking or working on other tasks. Wearable computing potentially offers much greater consistency in human-computer interaction – constant access to the computer, constant connectivity, without a computing device being used in an on-and-off fashion in between other activities.

Once contemporary example of this is the new Google Glass, which represents an advanced, sleek, beautifully designed head-mounted wearable computer with a display suitable for augmented-reality applications – or just as an “ordinary” personal head-mounted display. Even before its public release, the frenzy surrounding Google Glass amongst technology enthusiasts demonstrates the potential level of market demand for wearable computers.

However, with a price of at least US$1500 price tag of Google Glass, (at least for its “Explorer Edition” beta version) this leads many to consider what potential might exist for the deployment of wearable computing and wearable sensor-network technologies – however at a lower cost.

One example is the category known as “Smart Watches” such as the Sony SmartWatch and Pebble Technology’s “Pebble” e-Paper watch – which both offer constant, on-the-go access to information from the Internet – and thus become a member of the Internet of Things – at a glance of the wrist. Text messages and email notifications are amongst the most simple, common examples of data that can be pushed to a smart watch, but the display of information from a multitude of other Internet-connected data streams is possible.

With the growing popularity and increasing hardware capabilities of smart phones, it is increasingly taken for granted that a smart phone carried on one’s person can act as a gateway between the Internet (connected via the cellular networks) and other smaller, lower-power wearable computer or sensor devices worn on the body and connected back to the smartphone via standard data links such as WiFi or Bluetooth. In using the smart phone as an Internet connection, the size, price and weight of the wearable device can be significantly reduced – which also leads to a considerable reduction in cost.

Furthermore, apart from providing mobile Internet connectivity, the smart phone can also provide a large display and an amount of storage capacity – which can be harnessed for the logging, visualisation and display of data collected from a network-connected sensor node wearable on one’s body, or a whole network of such sensor nodes distributed around different personal electronic devices carried on the person and different types of physical sensors around the body.

The increasing penetration of smart phones in the market and the increasing availability and decreasing cost of wireless radio-networked microcontroller system-on-chips, MEMS
sensors and energy efficient short-range wireless connectivity technologies such as Bluetooth 4.0 are among some of the factors responsible for increasing the capabilities of,
and decreasing the cost of, wearable computing and wearable Internet-of-Things and sensor platforms.

Speed and position loggers, GPS data loggers and smart pedometers intended for logging and monitoring athletic performance, such as the Internet-connected, GPS-enabled,
Nike+ system; along with biomedical instrumentation and sensor devices such as Polar’s Bluetooth-connected heart rate sensors are other prominent examples of wearable Internet-of-Things devices which are attracting increasing consumer interest on the market today.

Combined with display devices such as smart watches, smart phones and head-mounted displays such as Google Glass. these kinds of wearable sensors create a complete wearable machine-to-machine Internet-of-Things network that can be self-contained on one’s person. Which leads us to the next level of possibilities – what do your customers want a device to do? And how can it be accomplished? And do you have the resources or expertise to design, test and bring such a system to the market?

It isn’t easy – there’s a lot of technology to work with – however it can be done with the right technology parter. Here at the LX Group we have the experience and team to make things happen. With our experience with sensors, embedded and wireless hardware/software design, and ability to transfer ideas from the whiteboard to the white box – we can partner with you for your success.

We can create or tailor just about anything from a wireless temperature sensor to a complete Internet-enabled system for you – within your required time-frame and your budget. For more information or a confidential discussion about your ideas and how we can help bring them to life – click here to contact us, or telephone 1800 810 124.

LX is an award-winning electronics design company based in Sydney, Australia. LX services include full turnkey design, electronics, hardware, software and firmware design. LX specialises in embedded systems and wireless technologies design. https://lx-group.com.au

Published by LX Pty Ltd for itself and the LX Group of companies, including LX Design House, LX Solutions and LX Consulting, LX Innovations.