How often have you wondered if you have turned off the oven in your kitchen or locked the main door of your house? IoT-powered devices are here to make lives easier and remind you of the necessary actions. Mobile IoT-based applications deliver mobility to control devices and gadgets remotely, regardless of one’s location. This blog post is focused to offer a better understanding of how IoT mobile app developments are becoming useful and how businesses can benefit from this trend.

Internet of Things (IoT), by now, does not need any introduction. However, in brief, IoT is a network of physical devices that are implanted with sensors, software and other technologies to connect and exchange data with other devices and systems over the internet. IoT has become an integral part of every aspect of our lives. From common household products to sophisticated industrial instruments, IoT connects numerous devices to simplify operations. Experts predict that by 2025, there will be more than 22 billion connected IoT devices worldwide. This digit is sure to take over the world by storm!

What makes mobile IoT the most popular trend?

Smartphones are used by billions of people around the world, and the number is growing every day. As a result of their ease of development, mobile apps make sense as the main channel for accessing IoT. It’s due to the reality of networked appliances that are easily accessed through mobile apps from any location, that improves people’s lives. Mobile is also significantly a more versatile platform for data transmission. IoT devices can be efficiently managed and monitored using a single application on a device. Mobile apps play a significant role in the rise of IoT.

What's the connection between IoT devices and mobile apps? 

An IoT device and a mobile phone communicate through a mobile app. The mobile app serves as the primary interface for controlling smart devices. Also, to increase the effectiveness of IoT, mobile IoT apps augment and enhance their utilization.

For instance, your phone can notify your coffee machine that you are approaching, allowing it to begin brewing coffee prior to your arrival. However, you may wonder that such IoT devices can be controlled from a desktop computer as well. Then, why should you have a mobile app? Here are two major reasons you should know:

• Mobile phones are better suited for accessing information from any location.
• Smartphones are jam-packed with sensors of all kinds. Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and other wireless technologies are among the communication possibilities available to them.

Mobile phones not only transmit geolocation information to your devices with the help of mobile IoT apps but are the most convenient devices for managing IoT technologies because of their characteristics.

What are the benefits of IoT-based mobile apps? 

IoT-enabled services provide access, increase efficiency and drive greater personalization. Most IoT use cases are classified through the following three categories:

• Enabling access: Mobile-enabled IoT devices can ensure service delivery in remote areas.
• Improving efficiency: By real-time tracking of machinery, equipment, and field workers, businesses can gain insights, visibility and control through IoT, resulting in reduced waste, production boost, improved safety and extended life of assets.
• Personalization: Businesses can better understand and profile their customers using customer analytics, allowing them to give more tailored services on an individual level, altering the customer experience.

What are some examples of mobile IoT development? 

IoT is changing everyday aspects to enrich our lives by generating information to improve our convenience. It is bringing more and more things into the digital fold.

The capacity of IoT to supply sensor data and enable device-to-device communication is driving a wide range of applications. Let’s find out some of the most popular use cases and what they accomplish:

• Improving equipment and product quality monitoring to aid manufacturing efficiencies

With the help of IoT assistance, manufacturing machines can be monitored and examined on a continual basis to ensure that they are operating within acceptable tolerances. Moreover, quality faults can also be identified and addressed by monitoring products in real-time.

• Enhancing physical asset tracking

Businesses can easily track assets to find out where they are. They can utilize ring-fencing to protect high-value assets from being stolen or lost.

• Tracking human health and environmental factors through wearables

IoT wearables assist customers in better understanding their own health and allow clinicians to remotely monitor patients. This technology also enables organizations to monitor their employees' health and safety, which is particularly useful for those who work in hazardous situations.

• Embracing new possibilities

One example is the application of IoT in connected logistics for fleet management to improve efficiency and safety. Companies can utilize IoT fleet monitoring to increase efficiency by directing trucks in real-time.

• Innovating business processes

This is demonstrated by the usage of IoT devices for linked assets to monitor the health of remote machines and initiate service calls for preventive maintenance. Remote machine monitoring is also enabling new product-as-a-service business models, in which customers pay to use rather than acquire a product.

The final say

Mobile apps are at the forefront of IoT as we always have our smartphones handy. Smartphones also include a lot of sensors, which makes it easy to handle smart devices and gadgets. Undoubtedly, the market for IoT smartphone apps has a promising future through mobility. In the following years, IoT investments, as well as the number of connected devices and mobile applications, are predicted to skyrocket.

The head is surely the most complex group of organs in the human body, but also the most delicate. The assessment and prevention of risks in the workplace remains the first priority approach to avoid accidents or reduce the number of serious injuries to the head. This is why wearing a hard hat in an industrial working environment is often required by law and helps to avoid serious accidents.

This article will give you an overview of how to detect that the wearing of a helmet is well respected by all workers using a machine learning object detection model.

For this project, we have been using:

• Edge Impulse Studi to acquire some custom data, visualize the data, train the machine learning model and validate the inference results.
• Part of this public dataset from Roboflow, where the images containing the smallest bounding boxes has been removed.
• Part of the Flicker-Faces-HQ (FFHQ) (under Creative Commons BY 2.0 license) to rebalance the classes in our dataset.
• Google Colab to convert the Yolo v5 PyTorch format from the public dataset to Edge Impulse Ingestion format.
• A Rasberry Pi, NVIDIA Jetson Nano or with any Intel-based Macbooks to deploy the inference model.

Before we get started, here are some insights of the benefits / drawbacks of using a public dataset versus collecting your own. 

Using a public dataset is a nice-to-have to start developing your application quickly, validate your idea and check the first results. But we often get disappointed with the results when testing on your own data and in real conditions. As such, for very specific applications, you might spend much more time trying to tweak an open dataset rather than collecting your own. Also, remember to always make sure that the license suits your needs when using a dataset you found online.

On the other hand, collecting your own dataset can take a lot of time, it is a repetitive task and most of the time annoying. But, it gives the possibility to collect data that will be as close as possible to your real life application, with the same lighting conditions, the same camera or the same angle for example. Therefore, your accuracy in your real conditions will be much higher. 

Using only custom data can indeed work well in your environment but it might not give the same accuracy in another environment, thus generalization is harder.

The dataset which has been used for this project is a mix of open data, supplemented by custom data.

First iteration, using only the public datasets

At first, we tried to train our model only using a small portion of this public dataset: 176 items in the training set and 57 items in the test set where we took only images containing a bounding box bigger than 130 pixels, we will see later why. 

If you go through the public dataset, you can see that the entire dataset is strongly missing some “head” data samples. The dataset is therefore considered as imbalanced.

Several techniques exist to rebalance a dataset, here, we will add new images from Flicker-Faces-HQ (FFHQ). These images do not have bounding boxes but drawing them can be done easily in the Edge Impulse Studio. You can directly import them using the uploader portal. Once your data has been uploaded, just draw boxes around the heads and give it a label as below: 

Now that the dataset is more balanced, with both images and bounding boxes of hard hats and heads, we can create an impulse, which is a mix of digital signal processing (DSP) blocks and training blocks:

In this particular object detection use case, the DSP block will resize an image to fit the 320x320 pixels needed for the training block and extract meaningful features for the Neural Network. Although the extracted features don’t show a clear separation between the classes, we can start distinguishing some clusters:

To train the model, we selected the Object Detection training block, which fine tunes a pre-trained object detection model on your data. It gives a good performance even with relatively small image datasets. This object detection learning block relies on MobileNetV2 SSD FPN-Lite 320x320.    

According to Daniel Situnayake, co-author of the TinyML book and founding TinyML engineer at Edge Impulse, this model “works much better for larger objects—if the object takes up more space in the frame it’s more likely to be correctly classified.” This has been one of the reason why we got rid of the images containing the smallest bounding boxes in our import script.

After training the model, we obtained a 61.6% accuracy on the training set and 57% accuracy on the testing set. You also might note a huge accuracy difference between the quantized version and the float32 version. However, during the linux deployment, the default model uses the unoptimized version. We will then focus on the float32 version only in this article.

This accuracy is not satisfying, and it tends to have trouble detecting the right objects in real conditions:

Second iteration, adding custom data

On the second iteration of this project, we have gone through the process of collecting some of our own data. A very useful and handy way to collect some custom data is using our mobile phone. You can also perform this step with the same camera you will be using in your factory or your construction site, this will be even closer to the real condition and therefore work best with your use case. In our case, we have been using a white hard hat when collecting data. For example, if your company uses yellow ones, consider collecting your data with the same hard hats. 

Once the data has been acquired, go through the labeling process again and retrain your model. 

We obtain a model that is slightly more accurate when looking at the training performances. However, in real conditions, the model works far better than the previous one.

Finally, to deploy your model on yourA Rasberry Pi, NVIDIA Jetson Nano or your Intel-based Macbook, just follow the instructions provided in the links. The command line interface `edge-impulse-linux-runner` will create a lightweight web interface where you can see the results.

Note that the inference is run locally and you do not need any internet connection to detect your objects. Last but not least, the trained models and the inference SDK are open source. You can use it, modify it and integrate it to a broader application matching specifically to your needs such as stopping a machine when a head is detected for more than 10 seconds.

This project has been publicly released, feel free to have a look at it on Edge Impulse studio, clone the project and go through every steps to get a better understanding: https://studio.edgeimpulse.com/public/34898/latest

The essence of this use case is, Edge Impulse allows with very little effort to develop industry grade solutions in the health and safety context. Now this can be embedded in bigger industrial control and automation systems with a consistent and stringent focus on machine operations linked to H&S complaint measures. Pre-training models, which later can be easily retrained in the final industrial context as a step of “calibration,” makes this a customizable solution for your next project.

Originally posted on the Edge Impulse blog by Louis Moreau - User Success Engineer at Edge Impulse & Mihajlo Raljic - Sales EMEA at Edge Impulse

Internet of Things (IoT) today has brought a significant change in our day-to-day lives. And, with connectivity improving in the last few years it has become more widespread with the passing time. This technology has gained a lot of traction with the help of growing mobile technology. It is expected to witness a surge in the number of IoT applications that are expected in the coming years. 

So, it wouldn’t come as no surprise that companies are now starting to consider the integration of this nifty technology with iOS app development. This is because of the benefits such as ease of data collection, employee mobility, process automation, etc.

The integration of IoT into iPhone app development is one of the hottest technologies. It is making the rounds these days. Interestingly, this helps create numerous business opportunities for many enterprises across various sectors as more and more people find their way into the connected world of devices with data.

Before we move on to discussing how one can pick the right IoT development provider, allow us to also quickly list some of the main challenges you are likely to face during this process.

The development of IoT-driven iOS apps is also subject to a plethora of challenges and concerns as is any other digital product. Nonetheless, in the specific context of IoT apps, some of the key issues that are likely to emerge during the development process are connectivity, compatibility, privacy, and security. We mention these challenges to help you ensure that these challenges are properly addressed during the development process.

Now, some tips to help you find the right service provider for developing iPhone apps fortified with IoT.

1. Before you set off to find a development partner for your IoT-fortified iOS development project, it is highly advisable that you first take the time to understand precisely why you want to develop such an app. Take the time to elucidate the goal of developing such an app, what you expect to achieve with it, who is your target audience, etc. All these factors will, then, help you understand what your app should look like, the features it must have, the challenges you will face, and the kind of skills and experience you will need to help you get through this process with a robust product on the other end.

2. The next factor you must keep in mind while looking for a development partner is that the company you choose must be able to help you build a top-quality IoT-driven iOS app and that too without burning a hole in your pockets. What that means is to find a service provider who can deliver the required product without needing massive investments.

3. Now that IoT has firmly established itself as a force to be reckoned with, plenty of development service providers are looking to cash in on the popularity of this new technology. However, that does not necessarily mean they have the skill or experience one needs to develop high-quality iPhone apps. This is why experts recommend opting for a reputed company, even if engaging their services is comparatively more expensive. This will help ensure the timely development of a robust app.

It is clear as day to see that IoT brings a whole lot of value to the table, more so when it comes to iOS apps and their development. We understand trying to embrace new technology in your business and apps can be an intimidating endeavor, but hopefully, the above discussion can help allay some of the concerns you may have had about the process. For the rest, it is advisable to find an expert development company that has the relevant skills for developing iPhone apps for your business and the industry in which you operate. Once you find a trusted development partner, the rest of the process will be rather simple to navigate through.

As the app development industry continues to be a driving force in the global market and IoT becomes increasingly prevalent, more and more businesses are turning to React Native. Because it appears to offer benefits for such development, of course. It enhances the efficiency of apps as well as their productivity. Code is stable too.

Just a recap on technology concepts;
React JS is an open-source JavaScript library created by Facebook. It allows the inclusion of interactive elements and stores all the necessary data required for the creation of stable user interfaces for mobile or web applications. IoT, or the internet of things, on the other hand, is an ecosystem that enables connecting a variety of devices over the internet. It gives each of these machines/devices unique identifiers or UID’s that eases data transferring. React Developer Tools can help you in this regard.

Here are some other benefits of using React Native for the development of IoT apps.
1. Stability of code: The information flow structure is such that it moves downwards no matter the changes or updates to the structure. What this means is the programmer only needs to adjust the state before making changes. Once that is done only specific segments are updated when changes are made to them. About IoT apps, such an ability helps developers write a solid code database and ensure it can be executed seamlessly.
2. Extensive collection of tools: A crucial advantage that React Native offers in this context is its collection of tools aimed at enabling the development of top-notch front ends. It may also help to know that the library developers gain access to React Native is not only free but also comes in handy at various points throughout the development process.
3. Individual components: React Native involves individual components which mean issues with one component do not affect the other components in the app. About IoT apps, this segregation of components means the receipt of data, as well as the processing of said data, are distinctive. This can come in handy when the developer wants to endow the IoT app with avant-garde controls and functionalities.
4. Structural advantage: Since React Native is based on a composition model, the code the developer ends up writing for a React Native app is inherently organized. Now, what does that have to do with IoT? Well, since IoT relies on older larger, and a tad complicated models, React Native’s composition structure offers the scope to streamline the application development process.

Now let us also take a look at some of the limitations of React Native in this context.
1. High level of development expertise: There is no doubt about the fact that React Native is among the foremost options for UI frameworks. Unfortunately, its use also necessitates extensive expertise, especially when dealing with the development of intricate apps or complex functionalities or perhaps when the requests must switch from native code to JavaScript or vice versa.
2. Abstract layer: To make React Native’s functionalities work seamlessly with native apps, native OS platforms get an abstract layer. Now given the role this abstract layer plays, one can imagine why any errors in this layer can throw up errors across the entire app.
3. Third-party library-dependency: While it enables the development of top-notch mobile apps, the fact remains that often developers find themselves needing a lot of third-party libraries for native platforms when using React Native to develop an app.

No doubt React Native comes with its own set of limitations, which is something that would hold for practically everything. With that being said, this open-source UI development framework offers an impressive array of benefits for anyone seeking to develop robust and dynamic apps for a variety of platforms. So, go ahead and start looking for a trusted service provider for React Native mobile app development ASAP.

Today the world is obsessed with the IoT, as if this is a new concept. We've been building the IoT for decades, but it was only recently some marketing "genius" came up with the new buzz-acronym.

Before there was an IoT, before there was an Internet, many of us were busy networking. For the Internet itself was a (brilliant) extension of what was already going on in the industry.

My first experience with networking was in 1971 at the University of Maryland. The school had a new computer, a $10 million Univac 1108 mainframe. This was a massive beast that occupied most of the first floor of a building. A dual-processor machine it was transistorized, though the control console did have some ICs. Rows of big tape drives mirrored the layman's idea of computers in those days. Many dishwasher-sized disk drives were placed around the floor and printers, card readers and other equipment were crammed into every corner. Two Fastrand drum memories, each consisting of a pair of six-foot long counterrotating drums, stored a whopping 90 MB each. Through a window you could watch the heads bounce around.

The machine was networked. It had a 300 baud modem with which it could contact computers at other universities. A primitive email system let users create mail which was queued till nightfall. Then, when demands on the machine were small, it would call the appropriate remote computer and forward mail. The system operated somewhat like today's "hot potato" packets, where the message might get delivered to the easiest machine available, which would then attempt further forwarding. It could take a week to get an email, but at least one saved the $0.08 stamp that the USPS charged.

The system was too slow to be useful. After college I lost my email account but didn't miss it at all.

By the late 70s many of us had our own computers. Mine was a home-made CP/M machine with a Z80 processor and a small TV set as a low-res monitor. Around this time Compuserve came along and I, like so many others, got an account with them. Among other features, users had email addresses. Pretty soon it was common to dial into their machines over a 300 baud modem and exchange email and files. Eventually Compuserve became so ubiquitous that millions were connected, and at my tools business during the 1980s it was common to provide support via this email. The CP/M machine gave way to a succession of PCs, Modems ramped up to 57 K baud.

My tools business expanded rapidly and soon we had a number of employees. Sneakernet was getting less efficient so we installed an Arcnet network using Windows 3.11. That morphed into Ethernet connections, though the cursing from networking problems multiplied about as fast as the data transfers. Windows was just terrible at maintaining reliable connectivity.

In 1992 Mike Lee, a friend from my Boys Night Out beer/politics/sailing/great friends group, which still meets weekly (though lately virtually) came by the office with his laptop. "You have GOT to see this" he intoned, and he showed me the world-wide web. There wasn't much to see as there were few sites. But the promise was shockingly clear. I was stunned.

The tools business had been doing well. Within a month we spent $100k on computers, modems and the like and had a new business: Softaid Internet Services. SIS was one of Maryland's first ISPs and grew quickly to several thousand customers. We had a T1 connection to MAE-EAST in the DC area which gave us a 1.5 Mb/s link… for $5000/month. Though a few customers had ISDN connections to us, most were dialup, and our modem shelf grew to over 100 units with many big fans keeping the things cool.

The computers all ran BSD Unix, which was my first intro to that OS.

I was only a few months back from a failed attempt to singlehand my sailboat across the Atlantic and had written a book-length account of that trip. I hastily created a web page of that book to learn about using the web. It is still online and has been read several million times in the intervening years. We put up a site for the tools business which eventually became our prime marketing arm.

The SIS customers were sometimes, well, "interesting." There was the one who claimed to be a computer expert, but who tried to use the mouse by waving it around over the desk. Many had no idea how to connect a modem. Others complained about our service because it dropped out when mom would pick up the phone to make a call over the modem's beeping. A lot of handholding and training was required.

The logs showed a shocking (to me at the time) amount of porn consumption. Over lunch an industry pundit explained how porn drove all media, from the earliest introduction of printing hundreds of years earlier.

The woman who ran the ISP was from India. She was delightful and had a wonderful marriage. She later told me it had been arranged; they met  their wedding day. She came from a remote and poor village and had had no exposure to computers, or electricity, till emigrating to the USA.

Meanwhile many of our tools customers were building networking equipment. We worked closely with many of them and often had big routers, switches and the like onsite that our engineers were working on. We worked on a lot of what we'd now call IoT gear: sensors et al connected to the net via a profusion of interfaces.

I sold both the tools and Internet businesses in 1997, but by then the web and Internet were old stories.

Today, like so many of us, I have a fast (250 Mb/s) and cheap connection into the house with four wireless links and multiple computers chattering to each other. Where in 1992 the web was incredibly novel and truly lacking in useful functionality, now I can't imagine being deprived of it. Remember travel agents? Ordering things over the phone (a phone that had a physical wire connecting it to Ma Bell)? Using 15 volumes of an encyclopedia? Physically mailing stuff to each other?

As one gets older the years spin by like microseconds, but it is amazing to stop and consider just how much this world has changed. My great grandfather lived on a farm in a world that changed slowly; he finally got electricity in his last year of life. His daughter didn't have access to a telephone till later in life, and my dad designed spacecraft on vellum and starched linen using a slide rule. My son once saw a typewriter and asked me what it was; I mumbled that it was a predecessor of Microsoft Word.

That he understood. I didn't have the heart to try and explain carbon paper.

Originally posted HERE.

Only for specific jobs

Just a few decades ago, headsets were meant for use only with specific job functions – primarily B2B. They were used as simply extensions of communication devices, reserved for astronauts, mission control engineers, air traffic controllers, call center agents, fire fighters, etc. who all had mission critical communication to convey while their hands had to deal with something more important than holding a communication device. In the B2C consumers space you rarely saw anyone wearing headsets in public. The only devices you saw attached to one’s ears were hearing aids.

Tale of two cities: Telephony and music

Most headsets were used for communication purposes, which also referred to as ‘Telephony’ mode. As with most communications, this requires bi-directional audio. Except for serious audiophiles and audio professionals, headsets were not used for music consumption. Any type of half-duplex audio consumption was referred to as ‘Music' mode.

Deskphones and speakerphones

Within the enterprise, a deskphone was the primary communication device for a long time. Speakerphones were becoming a common staple in meeting rooms, facilitating active collaboration amongst geographically distributed team members. So, there were ‘handsets’ but no ‘headsets’ quite yet. 

Mobile revolution: Communication and consumption

As the Internet and the browser were taking shape in the early ’90s, deskphones were getting untethered in the form of big and bulky cellular phones. At around the same time, a Body Area Network (BAN) wireless technology called Bluetooth was invented. Its original purpose was simply to replace the cords used for connecting a keyboard and mouse to the personal computer.

As cellular phones were slimming down and becoming more mainstream, scientists figured out how to use Bluetooth radio for short-range full-duplex audio communications as well. Fueled by rapid cell-phone proliferation, along with the need for convenient hands-free communication by enterprise executives and professionals (for whom hands-free communication while being mobile was important), monaural Bluetooth headsets started becoming a loyal companion to cell phones.

While headsets were used with various telephony devices for communications, portable analog music (Sony Walkman, anybody?) started giving way to portable digital music. Cue the iPod era. The portable music players primarily used simple wired speakers on a rope. These early ‘earbuds’ didn’t even have a microphone in them because they were meant solely for audio consumption – not for audio capture. 

The app economy, softphones and SaaS

Mobile revolution transformed simple communication devices into information exchange devices and then more recently, into mini super computers that have applications to take care of functions served by numerous individual devices like a telephony device, camera, calculator, music player, etc. As narrowband networks gave way to broadband networks for both the wired and wireless worlds, ‘communication’ and ‘media consumption’ began to transform in a significant way as well. 

Communication: Deskphones or ‘hard’-phones started being replaced by VoIP-based soft-phones. A new market segment called Unified Communications (UC) was born because of this hard- to soft-phone transition. UC has been a key growth driver for the enterprise headset market for the last several years, and it continues to show healthy growth. Enterprises could not part ways with circuit-switched telephony devices completely, but they started adopting packet-switched telephony services called soft-phones. So, UC communication device companies are effectively helping enterprises by being the bridge from ‘old’ to ‘new’ technology. UC has recently evolved into UC&C – where the second ‘C’ represents ‘Collaboration.’ Collaboration using audio and video (like Zoom or Teams calls) got a real shot in the arm because of the COVID-19-induced remote work scenario that has been playing out globally for the last year and a half.

Media consumption: ‘Static’ storage media (audio cassettes, VHS tapes, CDs, DVDs) and their corresponding media players, including portable digital music devices like iPods, were replaced by ‘streaming’ services in a swift fashion. 

Why did this transformation matter to the headset world?

Communication & collaboration by the enterprise users as well as media consumption by consumers collided head-on. Because of this, monaural headsets have almost become irrelevant. Nearly all headsets today are binaural or stereo, and have microphone(s) in them.

This is because the same device needs to serve the purposes of both: consuming half-duplex audio when listening to music, podcasts, or watching movies or webinars, and enabling full-duplex audio for a telephone conversation, a conference call, or video conference.

Fewer form factors… more smarts 

From: Very few companies building manifold headset form factors that catered to the needs of every diverse persona out there.

To: Quite a few companies (obviously, a handful of them a great deal more successful than the others) driving the headset space to effectively just two form factors:

1. Tiny True Wireless Stereo (TWS) earbuds and
2. Big binaural occluding cans!

Less hardware… more software

Such a trend has been in place for quite some time impacting several industries. Headsets are no exception. Ever so sophisticated semiconductor components and proliferation of miniaturized Microelectromechanical Systems, or MEMS in short, components have taken the place of numerous bulkier hardware components.

What do modern headsets primarily do with regards to audio?

1. Render received audio in the wearer’s ear
2. Capture spoken audio from the wearer’s mouth
3. Calculate anti-noise and render it in the wearer’s ear (in noise-cancelling headsets)

Sounds straightforward, right? It is not as simple as it sounds – at least for enterprise-grade professional headsets. Audio is processed in the digital domain in all modern headsets using sophisticated digital signal processing techniques. DSP algorithms running on the DSP cores of the processors are the most compute-intensive aspects of these devices. Capture/transmit/record audio DSP is relatively more complicated than the render/receive/llayback audio DSP. Depending on the acoustic design (headset boom, number of microphones, speaker/microphone placement), audio performance requirements, and other audio feature requirements, the DSP workload varies.

Intelligence right at the edge!

Headsets are true edge devices. Most headset designs have severe constraints around several factors: cost, size, weight, power, MIPS, memory, etc.

Headsets are right at the horse’s mouth (pun intended) of massive trends and modern use cases like:

• Wake word detection for virtual private assistants (VPAs)
• Keyword detection for device control and various other data/analytics purposes
• Modern user interface (UI) techniques like voice-as-UI, touch-as-UI, and gestures-as-UI
• Transmit noise cancellation/suppression (TxNC or TxNS)
• Adaptive ambient noise cancellation (ANC) mode selection
• Real-time transcription assistance
• Ambient noise identification
• Speech synthesis, speaker identification, speaker authentication, etc.

Most importantly, note that there is immense end customer value for all these capabilities.

Until recently, even if one wanted to, very little could be done to support most of these advanced capabilities right in the headset. Just the features and functionalities that were addressable within the computational limits of the on-board DSP cores using traditional DSP techniques were all that could be supported.

Enter edge compute, AutoML, tinyML, and MLOps revolutions…

Several DSP-only workloads of the past are rapidly transitioning to an efficient hybrid model of DSP+ML workloads. Quite a few ML only capabilities that were not even possible using traditional DSP techniques are becoming possible right now as well. All of this is happening within the same constraints that existed before.

Silicon as well as software innovations are behind such possibilities. Silicon innovations are relatively slow to be adopted into device architectures at the moment, but they will be over time. Software innovations extract more value out of existing silicon architectures while helping converge on more efficient hardware architecture designs for next-generation products.

Thanks to embedded machine learning, tasks and features that were close to impossible are becoming a reality now. Production-grade Inference models with tiny program and data memory footprints in addition to impressive performance are possible today because of major advancements in AutoML and tinyML techniques. Building these models does not require massive amounts of data either. The ML-framework and automated yet flexible process offered by platforms like those from Edge Impulse make the ML model creation process simple and efficient compared to traditional methods of building such models.

Microphones and sensors galore

All headsets feature at least one microphone, and many feature multiple, sometimes up to 16 of them! The field of ML for audio is vast, and it is continuing to expand further. Many of the ML inferencing that was possible only at the cloud backends or sophisticated compute-rich endpoints are now fully possible in most of the resource-constrained embedded IoT silicon.

Microphones themselves are sensors, but many other sensors like accelerometers, capacitive touch, passive infrared (PIR), ultrasonic, radar, and ultra-wideband (UWB) are making their way into headsets to meet and exceed customer expectations. Spatial audio, aka 3D audio, is one such application that utilizes several sensors to give the end-user an immersive audio experience. Sensor fusion is the concept of utilizing data from multiple sensors concurrently to arrive at intelligent decisions. Sensor fusion implementations that use modern ML techniques have been shown to have impressive performance metrics compared to traditional non-ML methods.

Transmit noise suppression (TxNS) has always been the holy grail of all premium enterprise headsets. It is an important aspect of enterprise collaboration. A magical combination of physical acoustic design – which is more art than science – combined with optimally tuned complex audio DSP algorithms implemented under severe MIPS, memory, latency, and other constraints. In recent years, some groundbreaking work has been done in utilizing recursive neural network (RNN) techniques to improve TxNS performance to levels that were never seen before. Because of their complexity and high-compute footprint, these techniques have been incorporated into devices that have mobile phone platform-like compute capabilities. The challenge of bringing such solutions to the resource-constrained embedded systems, such as enterprise headsets, while staying within the constraints laid out earlier, remains unsolved to a major extent. Advancements in embedded silicon technology, combined with tinyML/AutoML software innovations listed above, is helping address this and several other ML challenges.

Conclusion

Modern use cases that enable the hearables to become ‘smart’ are compelling. Cloud-based frameworks and tools necessary to build, iterate, optimize, and maintain high performance small footprint ML models to address these applications are readily available from entities like Edge Impulse. Any hearable entity that doesn’t take full advantage of this staggering advancement in technology will be at a competitive disadvantage.

Originally posted on the Edge Impulse blog by Arun Rajasekaran.

In my last post, I explored how OTA updates are typically performed using Amazon Web Services and FreeRTOS. OTA updates are critically important to developers with connected devices. In today’s post, we are going to explore several best practices developers should keep in mind with implementing their OTA solution. Most of these will be generic although I will point out a few AWS specific best practices.

Best Practice #1 – Name your S3 bucket with afr-ota

There is a little trick with creating S3 buckets that I was completely oblivious to for a long time. Thankfully when I checked in with some colleagues about it, they also had not been aware of it so I’m not sure how long this has been supported but it can help an embedded developer from having to wade through too many AWS policies and simplify the process a little bit.

Anyone who has attempted to create an OTA Update with AWS and FreeRTOS knows that you have to setup several permissions to allow an OTA Update Job to access the S3 bucket. Well if you name your S3 bucket so that it begins with “afr-ota”, then the S3 bucket will automatically have the AWS managed policy AmazonFreeRTOSOTAUpdate attached to it. (See Create an OTA Update service role for more details). It’s a small help, but a good best practice worth knowing.

Best Practice #2 – Encrypt your firmware updates

Embedded software must be one of the most expensive things to develop that mankind has ever invented! It’s time consuming to create and test and can consume a large percentage of the development budget. Software though also drives most features in a product and can dramatically different a product. That software is intellectual property that is worth protecting through encryption.

Encrypting a firmware image provides several benefits. First, it can convert your firmware binary into a form that seems random or meaningless. This is desired because a developer shouldn’t want their binary image to be easily studied, investigated or reverse engineered. This makes it harder for someone to steal intellectual property and more difficult to understand for someone who may be interested in attacking the system. Second, encrypting the image means that the sender must have a key or credential of some sort that matches the device that will decrypt the image. This can be looked at a simple source for helping to authenticate the source, although more should be done than just encryption to fully authenticate and verify integrity such as signing the image.

Best Practice #3 – Do not support firmware rollbacks

There is often a debate as to whether firmware rollbacks should be supported in a system or not. My recommendation for a best practice is that firmware rollbacks be disabled. The argument for rollbacks is often that if something goes wrong with a firmware update then the user can rollback to an older version that was working. This seems like a good idea at first, but it can be a vulnerability source in a system. For example, let’s say that version 1.7 had a bug in the system that allowed remote attackers to access the system. A new firmware version, 1.8, fixes this flaw. A customer updates their firmware to version 1.8, but an attacker knows that if they can force the system back to 1.7, they can own the system. Firmware rollbacks seem like a convenient and good idea, in fact I’m sure in the past I used to recommend them as a best practice. However, in today’s connected world where we perform OTA updates, firmware rollbacks are a vulnerability so disable them to protect your users.

Best Practice #4 – Secure your bootloader

Updating firmware Over-the-Air requires several components to ensure that it is done securely and successfully. Often the focus is on getting the new image to the device and getting it decrypted. However, just like in traditional firmware updates, the bootloader is still a critical piece to the update process and in OTA updates, the bootloader can’t just be your traditional flavor but must be secure.

There are quite a few methods that can be used with the onboard bootloader, but no matter the method used, the bootloader must be secure. Secure bootloaders need to be capable of verifying the authenticity and integrity of the firmware before it is ever loaded. Some systems will use the application code to verify and install the firmware into a new application slot while others fully rely on the bootloader. In either case, the secure bootloader needs to be able to verify the authenticity and integrity of the firmware prior to accepting the new firmware image.

It’s also a good idea to ensure that the bootloader is built into a chain of trust and cannot be easily modified or updated. The secure bootloader is a critical component in a chain-of-trust that is necessary to keep a system secure.

Best Practice #5 – Build a Chain-of-Trust

A chain-of-trust is a sequence of events that occur while booting the device that ensures each link in the chain is trusted software. For example, I’ve been working with the Cypress PSoC 64 secure MCU’s recently and these parts come shipped from the factory with a hardware-based root-of-trust to authenticate that the MCU came from a secure source. That Root-of-Trust (RoT) is then transferred to a developer, who programs a secure bootloader and security policies onto the device. During the boot sequence, the RoT verifying the integrity and authenticity of the bootloader, which then verifies the integrity and authenticity of any second stage bootloader or software which then verifies the authenticity and integrity of the application. The application then verifies the authenticity and integrity of its data, keys, operational parameters and so on.

This sequence creates a Chain-Of-Trust which is needed and used by firmware OTA updates. When the new firmware request is made, the application must decrypt the image and verify that authenticity and integrity of the new firmware is intact. That new firmware can then only be used if the Chain-Of-Trust can successfully make its way through each link in the chain. The bottom line, a developer and the end user know that when the system boots successfully that the new firmware is legitimate. 

Conclusions

OTA updates are a critical infrastructure component to nearly every embedded IoT device. Sure, there are systems out there that once deployed will never update, however, those are probably a small percentage of systems. OTA updates are the go-to mechanism to update firmware in the field. We’ve examined several best practices that developers and companies should consider when they start to design their connected systems. In fact, the bonus best practice for today is that if you are building a connected device, make sure you explore your OTA update solution sooner rather than later. Otherwise, you may find that building that Chain-Of-Trust necessary in today’s deployments will be far more expensive and time consuming to implement.

Originally posted here.

Would you like to live in a city where everything around you is digitalized? It’s always a better option to upgrade from a traditional way of living to a smart way of living. Every city should implement electric vehicle charging, smart parking, and an IoT-based smart waste management system for better living.

The evolution of IoT and sensors has evolved the concept of smart city technology. When it comes to keeping the city clean, involving such systems is a smart move smart waste management has become the new frontier for local authorities to reduce and recycle solid waste.

How is Smart Waste Management Making Cities Smarter?

In the olden days, people managed the trash by sending the trucks to collect the waste every day at scheduled routes even if the bin was not full. This is a waste of time and resources; instead, imposing smart waste management at every scheduled route is the best solution for timely trash pickup with the right resource management. To understand the solution to this problem, and propose a smart waste management system, read further.

Before going towards why implementing, smart waste management is important, understand what exactly is the problem.

Defining the Problem of collecting the trash

Currently, the trash that people create is thrown in nearby trash cans. These cans are then emptied by the municipalities or private truck companies that manage to remove the wastes at a scheduled time and transfer the same for recycling.

This process is followed in every city, and it may solve the waste issue partially but leaves other critical problems such as;

• Overfilled bins are not catered, and underfilled bins are collected before time.
• Overfilled bins may create unhygienic conditions.
• Unoptimized truck routes may result in excess usage of fuel and environmental pollution.
• Collective trash is combined that becomes difficult to sort during recycling.

Well, the best way to sort out all the above issues is to implement smart waste management systems.

Alleviate these problems with IoT based smart waste management systems for smart city

The right way of waste management can prevent environmental issues and air pollution. It is necessary to take care of hygiene and control the overloading carrier of waste disposal. There are many cities where IoT systems have been implemented.

By 2027, the smart waste management market will reach $4.10B with a 15.1% CAGR globally.

The smart bins work with the help of a sensor attached to the bin. It can help measure the fill level to further communicate the trash collectors with the data processed in the cloud. It optimizes the route of collection trucks without wasting time and fuel.

The simple solution to the traditional waste collection is to implement smart waste management for a smart city. With the increase in mitigating the waste issues with smart IoT systems, even urban areas are willing to implement smart waste management programs for clean and hygienic environments.

Improved Smart Waste Management for Smart City

The amount of city garbage that city dwellers produce is on the target of reaching six million tons in the next few years. Investing in the new IoT smart-based waste management system can help in optimized waste collection. The below points can help you understand how the IoT smart system can convert your city into a smart one.

1. Timely pickup of trash

IoT-based smart waste management will signal the waste collection companies before the trash bins start overflowing. Once the trash cans are full, the collectors are alerted to reach the area to empty the bins.

2. Re-route the pickup

Solid wastes can differ daily or weekly. As you can see, trash cans are everywhere in condos, commercial buildings, and public places; smart waste management companies can take a step to attach a sensor to the trash cans to measure the filled levels. The IoT solutions can collect the data and route it to the collectors based on which smart bin needs to be emptied in priority.

3. Data Analysis

The connected sensors collect the data whenever the trash is filled and when it was last emptied. The designed system can prove how important it is to have IoT based smart waste management system. It helps in planning the distribution of the dumpsters and eliminates the incorrect ways of removing the wastes.

With the information mentioned above, you can understand how implementing IoT-based smart waste management systems can change the environment and improve picking up solid wastes smartly.

Conclusion - Transform your City into a Smart One

Smart waste management services can benefit the cities and the citizens with smart waste management. The companies can use the smart-built sensors to increase efficiency and enhance customer satisfaction by preventing the overflowing of the waste bins. It is advisable to start implementing smart IoT systems in every city.

Wi-Fi, NB-IoT, Bluetooth, LoRaWAN… This webinar will help you to choose the appropriate connectivity protocol for your IoT application.

Connectivity is cool! The cornucopia of connectivity choices available to us today would make engineers gasp in awe and disbelief just a few short decades ago.

I was just pondering this point and – as usual – random thoughts started to bounce around my poor old noggin. Take the topic of interoperability, for example (for the purposes of these discussions, we will take “interoperability” to mean “the ability of computer systems or software to exchange and make use of information”).

Don’t get me started on the subject of the Endian Wars. Instead, let’s consider the 7-bit American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) that we know and love. The currently used ASCII standard of 96 printing characters and 32 control characters was first defined in 1968. For machines that supported ASCII, this greatly facilitated their ability to exchange information.

For reasons of their own, the folks at IBM decided to go their own way by developing a proprietary 8-bit code called the Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code (EBCDIC). This code was first used on the IBM 360 computer, which was presented to the market in 1964. Just for giggles and grins, IBM eventually introduced 57 different variants EBCDIC targeted at different countries (a “standard” that came in 57 different flavors!). This obviously didn’t help IBM machines in different countries to make use of each other’s files. Even worse, different types of IBM computers found difficult to talk to each other, let alone with machines from other manufacturers.

There’s an old joke that goes, “Standard are great – everyone should have one.” The problem is that almost everybody did. Sometime around late-1980 or early 1981, for example, I was working at International Computers (ICL) in Manchester, England. I recall being invited to what I was told was going to be a milestone event. This turned out to be a demonstration in which a mainframe computer was connected to a much smaller computer (akin to one of the first PCs) via a proprietary wired network. With great flourish and fanfare, the presenter created and saved a simple ASCII text file on the mainframe, then – to the amazement of all present – opened and edited the same file on the small computer.

This may sound like no big deal to the young folks of today, but it was an event of such significance at that time that journalists from the national papers came up on the train from London to witness this august occasion with their own eyes so that they could report back to the unwashed masses.

Now, of course, we have a wide variety of wired standards, from simple (short range) protocols like I2C and SPI, to sophisticated (longer range) offerings like Ethernet. And, of course, we have a cornucopia of wireless standards like Wi-Fi, NB-IoT, Bluetooth, and LoRaWAN. In some respects, this is almost an embarrassment of riches … there are so many options … how can we be expected to choose the most appropriate connectivity protocol for our IoT applications?

Well, I’m glad you asked, because I will be hosting a one-hour webinar on this very topic on Tuesday 28 September 2021, starting at 8:00 a.m. Pacific Time (11:00 a.m. Eastern Time).

Presented by IoT Central and sponsored by ARM, yours truly will be joined in this webinar by Samuele Falconer (Principal Product Manager at u-blox), Omer Cheema (Head of the Wi-Fi Business Unit at Renesas Semiconductor), Wienke Giezeman (Co-Founder and CEO at The Things Industries), and Thomas Cuyckens (System Architect at Qorvo).

If you are at all interested in connectivity for your cunning IoT creations, then may I make so bold as to suggest you Register Now before all of the good virtual seats are taken. I’m so enthused by this event that I’m prepared to pledge on my honor that – if you fail to learn something new – I will be very surprised (I was going to say that I would return the price of your admission but, since this event is free, that would have been a tad pointless).

So, what say you? Can I dare to hope to see you there? Register Now

Posted by Terri Hiskey

Without mindful and strategic investments, a company’s supply chain could become wedged in its own proverbial Suez Canal, ground to a halt by outside forces and its inflexible, complex systems.

It’s a dramatic image, but one that became reality for many companies in the last year. Supply chain failures aren’t typically such high-profile events as the Suez Canal blockage, but rather death by a thousand inefficiencies, each slowing business operations and affecting the customer experience.

Delay by delay and spreadsheet by spreadsheet, companies are at risk of falling behind more nimble, cloud-enabled competitors. And as we emerge from the pandemic with a new understanding of how important adaptable, integrated supply chains are, company leaders have critical choices to make.

The Hannover Messe conference (held online from April 12-16) gives manufacturing and supply chain executives around the world a chance to hear perspectives from industry leaders and explore the latest manufacturing and supply chain technologies available.

Technology holds great promise. But if executives don’t ask key strategic questions to supply chain software vendors, they could unknowingly introduce a range of operational and strategic obstacles into their company’s future.

If you’re attending Hannover Messe, here are a few critical questions to ask:

Are advanced technologies like machine learning, IoT, and blockchain integrated into your supply chain applications and business processes, or are they addressed separately?

It’s important to go beyond the marketing. Is the vendor actually promoting pilots of advanced technologies that are simply customized use cases for small parts of an overall business process hosted on a separate platform? If so, it may be up to your company to figure out how to integrate it with the rest of that vendor’s applications and to maintain those integrations.

To avoid this situation, seek solutions that have been purpose-built to leverage advanced technologies across use cases that address the problems you hope to solve. It’s also critical that these solutions come with built-in connections to ensure easy integration across your enterprise and to third party applications.

Are your applications or solutions written specifically for the cloud?

If a vendor’s solution for a key process (like integrated business planning or plan to produce, for example) includes applications developed over time by a range of internal development teams, partners, and acquired companies, what you’re likely to end up with is a range of disjointed applications and processes with varying user interfaces and no common data model. Look for a cloud solution that helps connect and streamline your business processes seamlessly.

Update schedules for the various applications could also be disjointed and complicated, so customers can be tempted to skip updates. But some upgrades may be forced, causing disruption in key areas of your business at various times.

And if some of the applications in the solution were written for the on-premises world, business processes will likely need customization, making them hard-wired and inflexible. The convenience of cloud solutions is that they can take frequent updates more easily, resulting in greater value driven by the latest innovations.

Are your supply chain applications fully integrated—and can they be integrated with other key applications like ERP or CX?

A lack of integration between and among applications within the supply chain and beyond means that end users don’t have visibility into the company’s operations—and that directly affects the quality and speed of business decisions. When market disruptions or new opportunities occur, unintegrated systems make it harder to shift operations—or even come to an agreement on what shift should happen.

And because many key business processes span multiple areas—like manufacturing forecast to plan, order to cash, and procure to pay—integration also increases efficiency. If applications are not integrated across these entire processes, business users resort to pulling data from the various systems and then often spend time debating whose data is right.

Of course, all of these issues increase operational costs and make it harder for a company to adapt to change. They also keep the IT department busy with maintenance tasks rather than focusing on more strategic projects.

Do you rely heavily on partners to deliver functionality in your supply chain solutions?

Ask for clarity on which products within the solution belong to the vendor and which were developed by partners. Is there a single SLA for the entire solution? Will the two organizations’ development teams work together on a roadmap that aligns the technologies? Will their priority be on making a better solution together or on enhancements to their own technology? Will they focus on enabling data to flow easily across the supply chain solution, as well as to other systems like ERP? Will they be able to overcome technical issues that arise and streamline customer support?

It’s critical for supply chain decision-makers to gain insight into these crucial questions. If the vendor is unable to meet these foundational needs, the customer will face constant obstacles in their supply chain operations.

Originally posted here.

Waste management is a global concern. According to The World Bank report, about 2.01 billion tonnes of solid waste is generated globally every year. 33% of that waste is not managed in an environmentally safe manner. Waste management in densely populated urban areas is a major problem. The lack of it leads to environmental contamination. It ends up spreading diseases in epidemic proportions. It is a challenge for both developed and developing countries.

By 2050, it is estimated to grow to 3.40 billion tonnes. But here is the catch. IoT waste management systems can help, Municipalities across the globe can employ IoT to manage waste better. IoT technologies are already being employed for modern supply chains. IoT waste management systems have become invaluable as they optimize and automate most of the processes in the industry. IoT adoption, however, is far more significant on the supply chain side. While many IoT-based waste management systems are already in place, a lot of challenges hold them back. 

A smart city collects data of personal vehicles, buildings, public transport, components of urban infrastructures such as power grids and waste management systems, and citizens. The insights derived from the real-time data help municipalities to manage these systems. IoT waste management is a new frontier for local authorities, aiming to reduce municipal waste. As per a recent survey by IoT Analytics, over 70% of cities have deployed IoT systems for security, traffic, and water level monitoring. It is yet to be fully deployed for smart waste management systems using IoT.

With rapid population increase, sanitation-related issues concerning garbage management are on a decline. It creates unhygienic conditions for the citizens in the surrounding areas, leading to the spread of diseases. IoT in waste management is a trending solution. By using IoT, waste management companies can increase operational efficiency and reduce costs. 

The waste collection process in urban areas is complex. It requires a significant amount of resources. More than $300 million per capita is spent annually in collecting and managing waste. Most of the high-income cities charge their citizens to cover a fraction of this expense. The rest of the expense is compensated from the tax revenue, which financially burdens the local government.

Municipalities and waste management companies have improved route efficiencies. But they haven't leveraged technological innovations for improving operational efficiency. Even with the route optimization process, the manual process wastes money and time. The use of smart devices, machine-to-machine connectivity, sensors, and IoT can reduce costs. A smart waste management system using IoT can reduce expenses in the trash collection process. But how? How does the use of IoT in waste management improve waste collection efficiencies?

How Does IoT in Waste management Respond to Operational Inefficiencies?

A smart waste management system using IoT improves the efficiency of collecting waste and recycling. Route optimization is the most common use case for using IoT waste management solutions, which reduces fuel consumption. 

IoT-powered, smart waste management solutions comprise endpoints (sensors), IoT platforms, gateways, and web and mobile applications. Sensors are attached to dumpsters to check their fill level. Gateways bridge the gap between the IoT platform and the sensor, sending data to the cloud. IoT platforms then transform the raw data into information. 

Benefits of IoT Waste Management Solutions

There are several advantages of using IoT-powered waste management solutions. 

• Reduced Waste Collection Costs:
  Dumpsters that employ IoT can transmit their real-time information on fill-level. The data is shared with the waste collectors. The use of data and selection of optimum routes leads the waste collection trucks to consider the dumpsters with high fill levels. This saves fuel, money, and effort. 
  
• No Missed Pickups:
  The smart IoT waste management system eliminates the overflowing of trash bins. The authorities are immediately notified when the trash bins are about to fill up to their capacity. And the collection trucks are scheduled for pickup. 
• Waste Generation Analysis:
  IoT waste management isn't about route optimization alone. The actual value of an IoT-powered process lies in data analysis. Most IoT solutions are coupled with data analytics capabilities. They help IoT waste management companies anticipate future waste generation.
• Reduction In Carbon Dioxide Emission:
  Optimized routes cause less fuel consumption. They reduce the carbon footprint and make the waste management process eco-friendlier.
• Efficient Recycling:
  Over the years, the appearance of consumer electronic devices in landfills has become a growing concern. This is due to its harmful chemicals and valuable components. But this concern also presents an opportunity. IoT offers an opportunity for businesses by using sanitation systems to recycle e-waste for resources.
• Automating IoT Management Systems:
  IoT waste management can also be helpful in waste categorization. The use of digital bins can help in automating the sorting, segregation, and categorization of waste. This saves a lot of man-hours. A Polish company Bin-e combines AI-based object recognition, fill level control and data processing. Its 'Smart Waste Bins' identifies and sorts waste into four categories - paper, glass, plastic, and metal. This makes waste processing more efficient. 

Future of IoT Waste Management

IoT waste management is a boon. The growing use of IoT linked with the management of everyday urban life improves the everyday experience of the citizens. Additionally, it reduces carbon footprint. But to do so in the waste management segment, more support is needed from the public sector through incentives and regulations. The private sector needs to contribute via innovation. Engagement from the various state agencies is required to implement the usage of IoT applications. This will help build a more sustainable future.

Conclusion

Those managing the waste collection, sorting, segregation and categorization, can benefit from a smart waste management system using IoT. By employing IoT in waste management, waste management companies can increase operational efficiency. It can reduce costs and enhance the satisfaction level of citizens by ensuring dumpsters don't overflow.

Many businesses are already taking advantage of IoT solutions to improve their efficiency and create new revenue streams. However, if you're considering launching a connected business, one of the most important factors to contemplate is the cost of IoT software implementation. This article will give you an overview of what goes into IoT software development and maintenance. 

Different factors feed into the cost, but the two most common concerns for companies getting into IoT are the cost of initial software development (or “integration”) and ongoing expenses after devices have been deployed. Unfortunately, as key stakeholders ponder over the ever-present build vs buy dilemma, the ones who lean towards building often tend to underestimate both significantly.

Let's take a look at a minimum set of software products you would need today to run a connected product, business, or service. First of all, firmware - software that is uploaded and then runs on the hardware. It provides a low-level control for the device's specific logic. Networks and connectivity – it's a part of firmware development, but I would move it into a separate domain, crucial for any IoT implementation.

Cloud is any service made available to users on demand via the Internet from a cloud computing provider's servers. The IoT servers have different purposes, like administration, monitoring, data gathering and analysis. Applications - once the device is connected, in today's reality you would need a user interface to interact with the device or service, configure it, control and monitor remotely, visualize processes, etc. It can be a touch control, a mobile app, a web app, a voice app (e.g. Amazon Alexa skill), etc.

Working with deployed connected products also usually requires two different types of apps: customer-facing applications (remote control, automation settings, maintenance alerts) and applications for internal company use (fleet management, analytics, device health tracking, performance tracking and maintenance alerts). And one thing is to offer an app, and a totally different thing is to build an app people will actually love to use. The latter requires a particularly strong UI/UX expertise in addition to the expected front-end, back-end and QA resources. 

As part of an IoT solution, you'll need additional storage capacity and processing power to perform analytics, run reports, and house the vast amounts of data that will be generated. Invoicing for these capabilities can vary—from a fixed monthly cost to metered billing—so make sure you understand the pricing model to anticipate cash flow better.

Various IoT platforms offer parts of the solutions for the software needs mentioned above. However, it often takes at least 3-5 different vendors to get everything an IoT powered business needs. Not only is it challenging to manage so many vendors, but also the costs really start adding up, making IoT implementation and maintenance pricing prohibitive for many companies, especially the smaller ones.

Fortunately, there are now options like Blynk IoT platform that have launched solutions tailored specifically at small businesses and startups. As a result, engineers and entrepreneurs worldwide can build and commercialize connected products without the heavy investment typically required to start an IoT-enabled business. Anyone with an MCU, some coding skills, and a great product idea can create an IoT business. And their monthly software costs will be less than what they pay for a typical TV subscription in the US.

Out-of-the-box, Blynk is supposed to cover 90-100% of software needs a business typically faces in the first 2-3 years of IoT operations. The platform functionality includes device provisioning and management, data hosting in the cloud, mobile and web apps for customers and staff, firmware over-the-air updates, user and organization management, data analytics, all kinds of automations and much more.

IoT software - build or buy?

As you can see, building your own IoT software from scratch is not a cheap endeavor, especially with a team based in the USA. If you have all of the right people on board and have a bulletproof ROI model for your IoT investment - go for it, build in-house. But if you are an OEM whose main focus remains on their core products and you care about optimizing costs and your time to market - then you are probably better off leveraging a solid IoT platform. Those folks have already spent those years (and in most cases, millions) building out the software you need and testing it out with real clients, in real world conditions, with all of the priceless learnings that come with that.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, as the name suggests, enable a company, no matter the industry, to better plan the use and management of its resources and achieve seamless operations. Such solutions, when integrated with the Internet of Things (IoT), i.e. a network of connected devices that enables the exchange of data in real-time, can work wonders in the manufacturing sector. No, really. Now, if you are wondering why that is, allow us to demonstrate via some key benefits of this duo.

1. Better management of assets: Perhaps one of the best things about technologies and their evolution that helped businesses tend to their assets, machines, and equipment much better than before, i.e. not wait to tend to it till it has broken down and rendered unproductive, even if temporarily so. But thanks to IoT sensors embedded in such assets, it becomes that much easier to identify any wear and tear, any issues, etc. across their lifetime. These factors are then flagged to the ERP software, which then further informs the appropriate teams and people responsible for the maintenance of such assets. This allows companies to undertake preventive maintenance, thus prolonging the life of their assets. It also helps ensure that operations are not interrupted since maintenance work can be scheduled in a manner to prevent or minimize downtime.
2. Access to real-time analytics: As the basic idea of IoT suggests, what they do is double up as a source of 24x7 information. They glean data collected from the sensors and then channel said data into the requisite systems. This ability to collect data at all times, from all the connected devices, means manufacturing businesses can process the data through ERP systems to gain access to highly valuable information such as market trends, processes that might need improvements, any possible quality issues, and so much more. Such information, in turn, drives much more informed strategies and marketing-related decisions and that too in real-time.
3. Improved quality control: Quality is typically one of the key concerns on the priority list of any business involved in manufacturing, no matter what it is that one may be making. Of course, this is where long-established, archaic quality checks would come in, but the problem is that it is quite time-consuming, prone to high levels of human error, etc. This problem, thankfully, is easily addressed with an IoT-integrated ERP solution, which can empower companies and their management to better the quality of their offerings via round-the-clock monitoring of their production processes.

As the world and the technologies around us continue to evolve at a dizzying pace, ERP solutions have emerged as the crowd favorite for all modern businesses. Now, as evidenced from the above discussion, the said popularity of enterprise software development, fortified with advanced technologies such as IoT, artificial intelligence, etc., can bring a world of benefits to manufacturing companies as well as those operating in other sectors across the globe.

Hence, driving the demand for such solutions further up. With that being said, if you too wish to make use of all the aforementioned benefits and countless others such as automation, better levels of customer service, and more, you know the integration of ERP with IoT is the right way forward.

By Ricardo Buranello

The demand for Computer Numerical Control (CNC) equipment is gradually increasing and performing to expect a huge growth over the coming years. For this an annual growth rate of more than six percent. CNC machining plays a major role in present manufacturing and helps us create a diverse range of products in several industries, from agriculture, automotive, and aerospace to Semiconductor and circuit boards.

Nowadays, machining has developed rapidly in periods of processing complexity, precision, machine scale, and automation level. In the development of processing quality and efficiency, CNC machine tools play a vital role. IoT-enabled CNC machine monitoring solutions, which creates machine-to-machine interaction resulting in automated operations and less manual intervention.

Embedded the IoT sensors on CNC machines that can measure various parameters and send them to a platform from where the state and operation of the machines can be fully supervised. Furthermore, CNC machines can scrutinize the data collected from sensors to perpetually replace tools, change the degree of freedom, or perform any other action. 

ADVANTAGES:

An Enterprise can leverage the following advantages by coalescence of Industry 4.0 and CNC. 

Predictive Maintenance:

CNC Machine operators and handlers embrace the Industrial IoT which allows them to appropriately interconnect with their CNC machines in many ways through smartphones or tablets. Therefore the operators can monitor the condition of machines at all times remotely using Faststream’s IoT-based CNC machine monitoring.

This remote and real-time monitoring aids the machine operating person to program a CNC for a checkup or restore.

On the other hand, these can also arrange their CNC machines to send alerts or notifications to operators whenever machines deem themselves due for tuning or maintenance. In other terms, the machine will raise red flags about complications such as a rise in temperature, increased vibrations, or tool damage.

Reducing Downtime and Efficient Machine Monitoring :

Digital Transformation in CNC Machine solutions has broad competence and is not restricted to distant control and programmed maintenance for CNC machines. Reduce machine downtime and escalate overall equipment effectiveness by using our IoT system and grasping its real-time alert features. The Alerts received from machines can be used to do predictive measures and unexpected breakdown of tools or any other element of a CNC machine.

Faststream Technologies similar solutions to its clients by arranging the IoT energy management solution for their CNC machines. Pre-executing these solutions, the client was facing difficulties with the future breakdown of their machines. Faststream's IoT solution guided them to retain a clear insight into the running hours of their CNC machines, which in turn gave them exact thoughts of how they were maintaining their production run-time.

Machine downtime reducing solutions can be utilized for a chain of CNC machines to not only ameliorate their processing but also to boost the machine synchronization process in industrial inception and realize the operational eminence.

Less manual effort and Worker Safety:

For the bigger enactment, the technology of Industrial IoT can also be implemented to bring down manual efforts, or in other terms, mitigate the possibility of workers’ injury in the factory operation process.

From this action, machine-to-machine synchronization and interrelation come into the picture. The synergy between machines will result in more interpretation between various electromechanical devices, which will lead to automated operations in a Manufacturing unit.

Many companies are already working towards the development of smart robots and machines that can.

Several Companies that perform on smart robots and machine development can work on pre-programmed tasks and retaliation to the existing needs of CNC machines for bringing down the extra strain of quality operation from the manual workforce. All these robots can perform confined and elegant work like opening & close the slab of a CNC machine or reform the tool whenever sharpness is required.

Apart from the lowering injuries in the workshop, our Industry 4.0 in CNC Machine also helps in lowering material wastage and betterment the efficiency of CNC machines, which will help in the rise in production of exact elements in a shorter time frame.

CONCLUSION

CNC machines are electromechanical devices that can operate tools on a different range of axes with more accuracy to generate a small part as per command put through a computer program. These can run faster than any other non-automated machine as well as can generate further objects with high accuracy from any type of design.

Have tyou ever imagined you would one day wake up to news that technology is influencing an industry as offbeat as fashion? Well, here we are in this phase of tech evolution, where we would soon get to wear apparel not from clothing lines like Gucci or Saint Laurent but probably from companies like Apple, Samsung, Google or more.

Yes, smart clothing seems to be the future of wearable technology that kickstarted with ambitious projects like Google Glass. Today, we have first generation Iot wearable technology devices like smartwatches, health monitors, FitBits and more but soon, we will have clothing with embedded sensors that will connect to the internet.

Wearable fashion or smart clothing will be part of the Internet of Things revolution and soon give us insights on our vitals, temperature, hydration levels and bring in a range of predictive analytics concepts into our everyday life.

Excited?

We are, too and that’s why we decided to publish a post that explores what smart clothing is and how it is redefining conventions.

Let’s get started.

Smart Clothing Is The Future Of The Wearables Industry

Let’s start with some numbers. Statistics from the World Economic Forum revealed that around 10% of the people around the world will wear clothes that connect to the internet by 2025. 

This is a really good sign for the smart wearable technology industry. And if you’ve been wondering if this concept is something new or fresh, it’s not. Smart clothing has been a micro niche for a long time with several sports companies like Nike and Adidas rolling out very specific lines of smart clothes for sports purposes. What is new is the approach of mainstream commercialization of smart clothing. 

The idea is to embed IoT-specific peripherals like sensors, batteries and more into the fabric of clothes and connect the entire ecosystem to an app for visualization of diverse insights. With the app, consumers can also execute a couple of fancy actions like changing the design or color of their apparel in real time, change hues and do more.

To give you a quick idea of how remarkable the concept of smart clothing is, here are some pointers:

Smart clothing is highly beneficial in keeping track of vitals in people. Technology is also being developed to monitor the accumulation of brain fluids in real time and report stakeholders and doctors about consequences.

1. The predominant use of smart clothing lies in the sports industry, where several metrics could be monitored by coaches of individual players and the entire team to reach fitness and tournament goals.
2. From a manufacturer’s perspective, fraudulent and unauthentic copies of labels and apparels can be eliminated from the market through codes and layered validation mechanisms.
3. Patients in hospitals could wear smart clothing to track their recovery, reactions to medications, notify or call for nurses and doctors and more.
4. People suffering from dementia or Alzheimers could sport smart dresses to enable their friends and families to track them from a distance.
5. Adventurers, spelunkers, high-altitude trekkers and more could also benefit from smart clothing with details on oxygen levels, anticipated temperature, location tracking modules, hydration levels, humidity sensors and more.

Though this looks futuristic and ambitious, the biggest challenge for the smart clothing companies would be to incorporate IoT solutions into their fabrics. The human body consistently generates sweat and heat and there are chances that water from sweat could damage batteries or sensors embedded in the clothes. When we fix these concerns and deliver optimized outfits, smart clothes could very well be what we wear to work every day in the coming years.

Smart Fashion Products In The Market

Like we mentioned, smart clothes are in development and some products are actually available in the market as prototypes. Tons of Kickstarter campaigns are exploring the limitless possibilities of smart fashion as well. For a better clarity on what the products are, here are some real world examples. 

Smart Jackets

The best product in development is the smart jacket. Since 2015, two market players - Google and Levi’s - have been collaborating to launch smart jackets with touch-sensitive fabric. In this, capacitive threads made of copper have been developed and used as the jacket’s fabric to allow users to use their smartphones by just using their hands and gestures. 

Minority Report vibes anyone?

Smart Socks

An inevitable accessory, socks have always been in our wardrobes.Smart socks are here to replace the conventional ones and give you a more immersive experience. 

What could be immersive in socks you ask? 

Well, smart socks could sense the pressure you put on your foot when walking, calculate your walking speed, the distance you cover (and could cover) and offer a detailed visualization of insights from multiple data points. This could influence the way you walk as well.

Smart Shoes

If we’re making our socks smart, why leave behind shoes? Somebody out there had a similar thought and the result is a pair of shoes that tracks your fitness, speed, pressure and most importantly, lets you control your television using your feet. All you have to do is extend your foot, point at something on your television and press a button. We’re sure there would be more experiences added to the product as it evolves.

Smart Sleepwear

Sleep has always been a concern for most of us. While some of us oversleep, a few of us hardly get good sleep. There are tons of factors influencing our sleep including our sleeping positions, stress and anxiety levels and more. 

Smart sleepwear, however, is here to fix our broken and disconnected sleep patterns by giving us insights on breathing, heart rates, sleep positions and more. The best part is that you don’t have to wear an additional wristband for this. The fabric has embedded devices that take care of its intended purposes.

Is Smart Clothing The New-Age Market Wearable?

Wearable tech plays a crucial role in the tech space because it’s probably something that could be the most integral to people. Conventional wearable technology devices like wristbands, smartwatches, eyewear and more appear and function as extensions but that’s not the case with clothing.

It is us and who we are. From a consumer’s perspective, there’s no challenge involved whatsoever in maintaining smart clothes. It’s on companies to develop and launch products that could take in the regular wear and tear of humans and be resistive to it, be washable and more. 

If these preliminary challenges are taken care of seamlessly by companies, smart clothing could easily become the new-age market wearables in the future. It’s similar to what electric vehicles are to the automotive industry. 

Wrapping Up

This is an exciting time to be alive and innovations like these are proof of our collective wisdom taking us to a new level. Let’s wait and see if our favorite clothing brands join the smart clothing bandwagon and launch personalized clothing just the way we would like it individually. Also, let’s see what more innovation is waiting on the cards in this space.

With a lot of buzz in the industry, the Internet of Things, a.k.a, IoT, has successfully gained traction. Confused about what an IoT is? Don't be because you have been using it literally in your everyday life, and if not you, then definitely someone you know, for example, smartwatches, fitness devices, self-driving cars, smart microwaves, etc.

An IoT is a network of connected devices where the data and information are interlinked in a way you might not know!

Now that the concept of IoT is briefly cleared, let's see how it could become the fifth revolution in the dairy industry.

2018 has seen a fourth industrial revolution, which was a new step in the production, automatization, and computerization of the processes by using the data provided by the IoT devices. One might think this concept is only used in industries like health & fitness or electronics, but the revolution is no less in agro.

As per a study, in 2016, an agro-tech company received a massive amount of $3.2 billion investment. This provides enough evidence to show the growing graph of the need for digitalisation in every aspect of dairy farming.

Why is the need for smart dairy farming?

With the vastly growing industry, it has become the need of the hour to be up-to-date with the essential technology for the growing competition. To keep up with the healthy living of the livestock, it is essential to prevent any illness by diagnosing it at an earlier stage.

For 97% of the U.S. dairy farms, it is more than just their source of income and is a family-owned business. This also means that most of them have been into livestock farming for generations, but the business is not the same as decades before.

Smart dairy farming using IoT can become revolutionary solutions to improve farm capacity, reduce animal mortality and increase dairy output.

To meet the growing demand for dairy with the increasing population, especially in the developed countries, better tools and specialized equipment are required. IoT integrated smart-collars serve the purpose.

How does the smart collar work?

The smart collar is a complete IoT-enabled cattle management system with a physical product linked with a digital screen.

The cattle tracking device with an inbuilt GPS gives a real-time location of the cattle and sends the signals to the owners every quarter of an hour.

The collars get connected with the routers installed near the farming field, where they will get signals from.

The vital sensitive devices will be bridged to the collar strap, continuously providing reports over the software dashboard screen. As the belt is installed, the data gets transferred and stored in the form of graphs and charts.

What are the benefits of smart dairy farming using IoT?

Auto-Milking Process

Manual milking is a time-consuming process; instead, it also includes more staffing. IoT embedded smart collar belts can resolve the problem more efficiently with less manpower by introducing auto milking.

Since auto-milking is just a robotic system and is entirely automated, it is unaware of the temperature and any diseases affecting the cattle. The machine will yield all the cattle at the same time, the same way.

When we link IoT to the cattle, essential factors are looked upon, which otherwise can get ignored if done manually.

Temperature monitoring, disease tracking, and nutritional requirements are few, tracked down with a smart belt, and helps better quality milk production.

Tracking the heat cycle

Manually yielding milk to a cow that is not at its heat cycle would lead to low fertility. To continue the best quality milk, cattle must give birth to one calf a year to maintain the lactation period.

A lactating cattle undergo heat every 21-28 days but, is it possible to know that manually and that too accurately? It can be do-able but can take a lot of time.

The heat can stress down the cattle leading to lower milk production and, if yielded simultaneously, can further reduce the fat, protein, casein, and lactose content in milk.

To prevent such errors, smart collars would send alarms to the owner on its dashboard screen. It will notify when is the right time to yield, resulting in better milk production. 

Tracking the movement with GPS

The tracking collars installed with the GPS will give real-time data allowing individuals to know the accurate information and location of the animals.

The smart collar works best in the field of around 5-10 cattle, as each of them will work as a personal tracker and give owners a whole valuable time to focus on one livestock full time.

Investing over manpower comparatively seems less costly at the start. Still, as time passes by, IoT for cattle becomes a sustainable option and can help your business grow bigger in no time. 

Health tracking

Healthy eating leads to a healthier life. It works the same in all living entities on the planet. Many studies and experts say that "rumination in cattle is an indicator of health and performance"

The traditional method of visual analyses of ruminations was a process that required a workforce and was performed only when on the field. This is also limited to a particular population level; hence, the chances of errors increase.

What does one get to know about every cow's health quality by sitting idle at a comfortable place? The IoT-enabled software system will track individual cow's rumination data and will help producers to invite when one needs more attention.

Although visual observations can be trusted to access rumination activity in a cow, this method may not provide an accurate result when the challenge arrives to observe at a population level. It would hamper the health standards of the cattle. 

Decrease mortality with security alerts

What if one needs to know how much grazing a cow did on that particular day? It can only be possible by manually observing it. Furthermore, how to analyse if the rumination is being done effectively?

Monitoring the changes and behaviors of the herd is one of the most significant and time-consuming tasks.

Using IoT devices, such as smart neck belts, it gets easier to monitor fishy cattle movements. The belt sends alarms any time it detects that something is "Off."

The sensors will be embedded in the neck strap around the cow's neck, which will help farmers personally supervise the cow's movement and respond accordingly.

Smart sensors will automatically gather and store the data and will help farmers prevent any growing health issues. 

Control Disease Outbreaks

These speechless living are never going to deal with their health issues on their own. So whether or not there are any suspicious changes in their behavior, they are very likely to miss out upon some diseases.

The only way left to inspect the diseases is mostly by diagnosing yourself, which is almost certainly going to risk many other cattle lives too.

Lameness, foot and mouth disease, mastitis, and milk fever are some of the most common fatal diseases in cattle. These all can be avoided early and can save farmers from troublesome and financial crashes in the future.

The system will alert the farmer when it needs assistance with the help of an embedded smart vital monitoring device in the collar.

In the nutshell

In the world of "connecting everything," it not only connects the devices but information and data which can circulate within a span of milliseconds. So why not use the advantages of such devices when it comes to some unexpected outcomes?

Traditional methods of cattle farming are good enough. But, they might cripple milk quality and lead to a massive loss of cash flow if not looked upon. Cattle farming is not an easy job. It needs 24 hours of continuous monitoring and observations to have a successful income.

An IoT is a real-time data collection, precisely a replacement of manpower but a more refined version of it. By introducing the "smart cow" concept, the time and labor are reduced, and productivity increases.