However, one aspect of the deal is likely to send shockwaves through the industry.  That’s the price tag for the acquisition, which is $12.2 million.  Compare that to the value that TI paid for Chipcon in 2005, which was around $200 million.

Jennic is one of the last of the original, independent players to be sucked up by the big boys.  A few, like Greenpeak - the ultra low power chip company are sitting comfortably within specialist niches, but all eyes must now be on Ember.  Ember are the Grand Daddy of ZigBee and have probably seen most success of any of the start-ups, at least in terms of sales.  However, this latest purchases pitches them firmly against the battalion of big boys - TI, NXP, Atmel and Freescale, just at the point where the market is starting to see some traction.

A price tag of $12 million for a fabless company is not going to let investors sleep soundly at night.  Starting a fabless semiconductor company that is based on a standards compliant radio chip and application stack is not a cheap undertaking.  The general consensus is that it costs between $3 and $5 million dollars to spin each new version of chip, and it typically takes three or more versions before it sells in any volume.  Add to that the snail’s pace of a standard taking off commercially and you need to invest around $30 - $50 million to even get to first base.  Ember has currently raised around $89 million.  The question is, after the Jennic sale price of $12 million, who will consider them to be ten times as valuable?

As standards based radios mature, the type of customers for the technology change.  In the early days there are typically lots of small, innovative companies who do interesting things with the standards, but in low volume.  The next phase, as the standard becomes adopted, is for a few large companies to dominate, with the application for the standard being confined to one particular solution which ships in high volume.  The ZigBee community is expecting this to be smart energy, which is already sucking up significant numbers of ZigBee chips.  However, this is the point where the contacts and buying power of the larger chips companies can squeeze the smaller, independent players out.

Time will tell whether this happens to Ember; whether they’re acquired, or whether they establish themselves as an independent silicon vendor.  But with four of the big boys playing, each taking the view that the target market is smart meters and home automation, their room for manoeuvre may rapidly diminish.  A few years ago they struck a joint development agreement with ST, the other major remaining player in this market space.  Both sides may be considering it’s time to cash out on that one, but at what valuation?  The next twelve months will be interesting, both to see whether ZigBee achieves the momentum it has been looking for over the last five years, and which players survive  to profit from it.

This week, following the launch of Bluetooth low energy, the FAQ on the ANT website makes the strange claim that once Bluetooth low energy becomes available in mobile phones, ANT devices can take advantage of a bridge in watches to talk to phones.  It’s difficult to understand what, other than desperation at the advent of real competition, is driving them to say that.  It’s like telling vegetarians that you have a cunning plan which will enable them to eat meat.

Let’s start with the actual question and answer on the ANT site:

Q: Where does ANT fit with Bluetooth low energy (BT-LE)?

A: ANT is thrilled at the prospect of an ultra-low power, low cost wireless portal into cell phones (via an extension to Bluetooth called “low energy”) becoming available at some point in the future. Those wishing to deploy products now and in the next couple of years will be pleased to know that ANT and the ANT+ Interoperable Ecosystem are available now and are proven with millions of installed nodes. Once BT-LE does become available, ANT will provide a seamless, cost effective bridge solution for use in products like watches to enable forward compatibility with the millions of ANT+ devices already in the field at that time. Applications will then be able to take advantage of the best of ANT and ANT+ based products as well as connecting to next generation Bluetooth enabled devices.

I’m glad they’re thrilled about the prospect of Bluetooth low energy, as I am too.  What I don’t quite understand is how they think it is relevant to their future business plan.  Other than as a threat.

Unlike industry standards, like ZigBee and Bluetooth, ANT+ is a wireless standard that was developed by a single company - in this case Dynastream.  It’s not alone in that, and there’s nothing wrong with it, but there are some subtle but important differences between the two approaches.  The first is that standards generated by industry groups normally have multiple companies selling chips. 

It costs a lot to design a wireless chip - typically something between $2 million and $10 million.  So the best way to ensure multiple sources of chips is to get multiple silicon vendors involved in writing the standards.  Having multiple chip suppliers gives manufacturers confidence in the longevity of the standard, increases the number of experts contributing to the standard, so they’re more robust and reliable and helps to get the standard into mainstream products like laptops and phones.  This increases the volumes, driving down the price of chips, persuading more people to use the standard.  It’s a virtuous circle that can work well to get a standard from millions to billions of chips.

Bluetooth low energy was only formally adopted last week, but it already has five different companies offering chips.  For most of its five year life ANT has only had one chip supplier - the specialist RF chip company Nordic Semiconductor, although TI has recently announced support for it.  So it’s not yet seen massive growth, nor is it integrated into any phone of PC.  Whereas Bluetooth low energy will be, as it becomes part of the next generation of Bluetooth chips, which are already in these products.

The ANT answer tacitly acknowledges that it won’t make it into phones, hence the suggestion that it would need a bridge in a watch that converts ANT to Bluetooth.  However, this means the watch needs two radios, which would effectively double its power consumption, halving its battery life.  Which is not the ideal approach for a low power solution.

The second difference between industry standards and company developed ones is that in the latter case it means that one company owns all of the intellectual property in the standard.  They either licence this to each company using it, or bundle the licence through the chips.  It’s an approach that can make it faster to get to market, but it can cause worries.  Standards with lots of members generally ask every member company to agree to pool any relevant patents or IP so that everyone can use them without risk of infringement.  That means that the chance of patent infringement is low, particularly for a standard like Bluetooth, where over 13,000 companies have signed up to this principle.  The risk is not non-existent, but it’s about as good as you’ll get.  It also means that no single company can change their mind and withdraw a patent or control who they are selling the technology to.

That may not normally be a problem with a company owned standard.  It wasn’t with ANT.  Until Garmin acquired them.  At which point a lot of sports and fitness manufacturers realised that they were relying on a wireless technology that was owned by one of their competitors.

Companies are pragmatic; they generally realise that in the early stages of a market, it’s better to work together to grow the opportunity, rather than fight each other.  So the use of ANT has grown.  It’s readily available, easy to use, and it has a fast, efficient process to add new profiles.  But as Bluetooth low energy has come closer to market, more and more of these companies have started to show an interest in jumping ship.  That’s not just to move to a non-competitive licensing regime, but also to take advantage of the potential connections that they can make with billions of Bluetooth low energy enabled mobile phones.  And Bluetooth low energy has put in place a process for introducing new profiles which is just as fast and efficient as that within ANT.  So it will be able to support most of the applications that currently use ANT within the coming months.

That’s a prospect that obviously has ANT rattled.  Within five days of the publication of the Bluetooth low energy standard they’re posting this answer that they can “bridge” to Bluetooth low energy.  It’s certainly possible, but sports and fitness manufacturers don’t need to bridge if they adopt Bluetooth low energy in their products - they can connect directly. 

And any implication that the two are compatible is nonsense - they’re different radios and protocol stacks.  Time will tell which standard is adopted by the industry - they need to compete on their merits.  But it looks as if Bluetooth low energy has won the first round, just by announcing its existence.

(If you’d like to buy one of the anteater toys, go to Custom Coastal Store.  I’m not sure if it has blue teeth, but I thought its blue snout was rather appropriate.)

Bluetooth low energy is not just a variant of the existing Bluetooth specification - it’s an entirely new standard that’s been optimised for low power and internet connectivity.  It marks a step change in short range wireless, providing a new short range connection for a new decade.

That may sound somewhat overblown, but it’s true.  If you look at other wireless standards they differ mainly in topology.  Bluetooth classic (the one you’ve already got) is mostly used as a simple cable replacement to connect two devices to each other, whether that’s a headset, a games controller or a milking machine.  Wi-Fi connects devices to a static access point, which can then link them to a broadband connection and ZigBee connects a collection of devices together into a mesh.  If you want to do anything other than that with any of them, it’s quite difficult.

Bluetooth low energy turns a lot of conventional wireless thinking on its head.  It is a very asymmetric design, allowing you to make very simple devices, which can be very cheap.  These spend most of their life asleep, waking up occasionally to send data about themselves to something like a phone, a PC or a home gateway.  They ask these devices to forward that data to the internet, allowing them to function as web-connected products which can interact directly with web applications.  When they’re not doing that they go back to sleep.

These may seem a minor difference, but it has a profound effect on the way that you can design devices.  The fact that they sleep most of the time, means that they are very, very low power.  For many applications they can run off a small coin cell for years.  It means that the battery essentially lasts for the life of the product.  So you can design connected devices that never need charging.  If you don’t want a battery, you can use a tiny solar cell instead.  Bluetooth low energy takes a fraction of the power of other so-called low power wireless technologies.  The chips are so small, that a complete product can be made that’s the same size as the coin cell that powers it, and only a few millimetres thicker.

When they talk to a phone, they can display their data on the phone, or ask the phone to send it on to the net.  If the phone supports downloadable applications, then the device can tell it which apps to offer to the customer, making it even easier for them to load them.  In other words, it’s an architecture that’s designed for the new world of apps stores and the internet of things.

Blueooth low energy has taken a long time coming, but there are good reasons for that.  It first started life nine years ago in 2001, when it was presented by Nokia as a potential option for 802.15.4.  That’s the standard that eventually grew to spawn ZigBee, 6LowPAN, and a host of other radios.  Nokia’s proposal wasn’t accepted, so they continued to develop it with local partners, before launching it on the world as Wibree.  From there it was transferred to the Bluetooth SIG under the name of Ultra Low Power, from which it morphed into Bluetooth low energy.

It’s turned out to be a fruitful journey.  From the start, it had a different premise to other wireless standards.  Even back in 2001, Nokia’s vision was that it would be a low power radio that would allow everything that we carry with us or have around us to connect to a mobile phone.  Whereas other radios have had their market expectation set by the number of devices they can fit into (five billion for mobile phones, one billion for PCs), by using the mobile phone as a hub, the expectation was that this was a radio whose potential could be trillions of devices.

But if it was ever to get to that volume, or even to tens of billions, everything about it had to be right.  It needed to be the lowest power of any radio; it had to be the most robust against interference; it was vital that it was the lowest cost; interoperability was imperative, as was security and it had to be easy to implement.  Putting all of that together was not an easy task.  And it took time.

The prospect of what it could do galvanised the industry.  RF experts who had previously been involved with proprietary low power wireless chips joined in to add their expertise.  So did those who had designed the ultra low power radio behind ANT.  Drawing on the expertise of its 13,000 member companies, and its own experience of eleven years of wireless design, the SIG took the bold step of giving those designers a largely blank sheet of paper with the task of designing the best low power radio and protocol stack in the world.  Today the resulting specification has been adopted and I believe it is very much fit for purpose.

The task now is to put the chips and development kits into the hands of innovative designers and let their imagination run riot.  Anything that we touch or use can employ Bluetooth low energy to send its data to the net.  When you fill up a beer glass it can tot up your total on your Facebook page.  Your new remote control can work with any piece of audio or video equipment in the house.  When you lose it down the side of the sofa, you can find it using your phone.  Your mouse can run far longer on its batteries (limited only by its optical sensor), and with the advent of new medical sensors, it can send your pulse to your GoogleHealth record whilst you’re struggling to install Microsoft’s latest upgrade.

What gives it an unfair advantage over any other wireless standard is its ability to talk to the next generation of Bluetooth chips in mobile phones.  In a few years these phones will act as internet gateway for billions and then tens of billions of connected devices.  It’s the technology that the sports and fitness market have been waiting for, as has the consumer health industry.  It also gives the smart energy market a real standard to work with that will be ubiquitous in the Home Area Network, where it will gain dominance through its position in the mobile phone and remote control. 

And it has one more trump card - it has a roadmap to a price point that has the potential to decimate other wireless standards.  When Bluetooth chips first appeared on the market, they cost around $20.  Ten years later, in volume, that price has fallen to $1, driven by the volume of a billion chips per year.  Bluetooth low energy was designed to be low cost, even in low volume.  Today, for initial small volume applications, Bluetooth low energy chips will cost a few dollars.  Over the coming years, as it follows the same volume path,  that’s projected to fall to less than 20 cents.  It’s the only way any technology can get to the trillions.  It means it will become cheaper to use Bluetooth low energy as a wireless link than it will be to use a cable and connector.  In cars and household appliance, it will be cost effective to replace cables between front panel controls and displays and the control electronics inside them, which means it really will make sense to have Bluetooth in your fridge.  And the same chip can connect to the net to provide maintenance data, giving double value.  Effectively, connectivity becomes free.

It promises to be a revolution in the way products are designed and used.  If successful, it will do to connectivity what microprocessors did for control and applications.  The Bluetooth SIG has provided the standard.  It’s time to add your imagination.

To learn more about Bluetooth low energy, download the specification from the Bluetooth SIG website.  You can also read about how it works and how to use it in my new book - Essentials of Short Range Wireless, which is published on 7^th July.

Within the more general subject of smart grid, media coverage is centring on smart meters and the impact they will have on the consumer.  That’s resulting in some aggressive battles between competing standards groups, a growing level of negative publicity for utilities that are being portrayed as greedy ogres trying to get more money out of the consumer, and the appearance of ever more flamboyant futurologists who believe that the utilities will control all of the appliances in our homes.

That level of noise has the effect of making smart meters look as if they are the lynchpin of the smart grid.  Hence every utility is rushing to deploy them, backed by willing legislators showering them with stimulus funds.   It’s not difficult to see why we’re in this topsy-turvy state.  Underlying improvements to the grid don’t have a direct impact on consumers, or only do when the lack of them means that the consumer’s power disappears.  Which makes it boring.  In contrast, home automation offers the science fiction vision of devices that turn themselves on or off to minimise our energy bills and save the world.  But does it help the industry?

I’d like to hope that’s not the real reason that governments around the world are legislating and pouring money into smart grid evolution.   For utilities, the real job ahead is slightly different depending on where you look.  In the US, it’s about the need to understand far more about the state of every mile of the grid in order to upgrade it to maintain service.  Within Europe there’s less focus on the grid itself, as there’s a greater degree of confidence (or smugness) about its resilience.  Instead there’s concern is about the potential shortfall in generating capacity and how the utilities will manage to balance demand.

That difference in perspective across the Atlantic has resulted in some interesting differences in the approach to smart metering.  Certain countries have had AMR for years - Italy is a prime example, where its first generation roll-out was justified by the astronomical levels of customer fraud.  They’re just starting their second generation of “smart” meters and the general consensus it that they’ll be onto their third by 2015.  All three of which will be mutually incompatible.  That is not a sustainable business model.

The question of business model for smart meters is an interesting one, as it goes to the heart of who pays for the meters.  That’s something that has just become even more important, as Maryland has turned down Baltimore Gas & Electric’s request to get customers to fund their meter deployment through a retrospective surcharge.  What is difficult is to work out is exactly what the business model is?

Number one business model is that by providing customers with more information, it reduces their energy bill.  But that means a utility pays money to reduce its revenue.  So that doesn’t work.

Ah, says the industry, energy prices are going to rise, so it will help stop your bill growing.  It’s the old “jam tomorrow” argument, which has a bit more logic to it.  However, prices need to rise a lot to make consumers change their behaviour en masse.  When it costs ten times as much to do the laundry, users will do it.  When it adds 20 cents to a wash, it’s not going to happen.  So the question moves to being how quickly Governments will allow that level of price hike.  And the answer is probably not in the timescales in which they want smart meters deployed.  It would be too much of a vote loser to allow that.

Then there’s the populist vision of selling the convenience of automating the home.  That one’s been around since the 1950s and is still struggling.  It’s a geek play and will probably remain so.  It might be possible to sell the cost of smart meters to this demographic, but it’s barely a scratch on the surface of smart metering.

Once these have been dismissed, the business models turn towards improving efficiency of the utilities’ billing cycle.  These range from improving the ability to send accurate bills instead of estimates (and look what that did for PG&E), through to making it easier to send a consumer their final bill when they move house.  How any of these fund the cost of deploying and servicing a smart meter eludes me.

I don’t think I’m alone in this scepticism, as I see a significant number of utilities asking “What can a smart meter do for me”, particularly within Europe.  That’s in contrast to the more common question being asked in the US of “what can a smart meter do for the customer?”  The difference is probably a result of the lower level of media interest in smart metering within Europe, where there’s less discussion of the possible customer “benefits” of smart metering.

The problem with a high media and (by association) investor interest in smart metering is that it rapidly dominates the thinking of what smart grid is all about.  You can take the view that it’s no bad thing if it generates more attention, as underlying funding will grow for all parts of the picture.  However, if it sets unattainable expectations for consumers, deepening the subsequent “trough of despair”, which will then have a knock on effect across the whole industry.  So to some degree, the fortunes of the smart grid are being held hostage to the behaviour of the smart metering sector.  It’s a case of the tail wagging the dog.

Unfortunately, in concentrating on the gee-whizz aspect of meter applications, we may be losing sight of some of the more interesting things that smart meters can do for the grid.  Instead of the current fad of concentrating on an iPad (or should we call it an iHoD?) on every living room wall to help consumers reduce their utility bills, (and where is the business model in that?), smart meter deployments could be telling the grid useful things like outage information.  Of course, for that to work they need a gateway that works when the power fails.  I’m sure that someone is manufacturing and shipping meters or gateways that can do that, but I’ve yet to see one deployed that actually has a battery in it, as opposed to an empty battery compartment. 

Instead the smart meter industry appears fixated on consumer technology trends, with their associated short term attention spans.  Today it’s ZigBee smart energy (would that be version 1.0 or version 2.0, sir?).  Tomorrow it will be Bluetooth, so you can control it from your smartphone and the month after that we’ll have Dash7 connecting it directly to your local military nuclear reactor.  Which is enough to make any consumer want to forget energy conservation and turn up the air conditioning.

Incidentally, there was a refreshing blast of sanity in the recent Public Service Commission of Maryland’s Order 83410 turning down Baltimore Gas & Electricity’s proposal to fund a deployment of smart meters by adding a customer surcharge.   Their adjudication included the observation that “If it turns out that appliance manufacturers decide to adopt some alternative to ZigBee technology, the expectation that the proposed “smart meters” will one day be capable of communicating with a customer’s “smart” appliances evaporates.  BGE ratepayers will then be stuck paying higher rates for a white elephant, while customers of utilities that prudently waited to allow the industry to mature will enjoy the benefits of a wiser and safer “smart grid” deployment.”

I doubt that the ZigBee Alliance will appreciate being categorised as a potential white elephant, but it’s a true statement, regardless of which of the current wireless standards are chosen.  We’re currently several years away from deciding what the industry will choose.  Making a decision now is perilous.  The approach of groups like UMI - the Universal Metering Interface and the U-SNAP Alliance, which both build in upgradability to different standards, look as if they deserve rather more attention from the industry than they are getting.

Utilities and grid sections of the industry need to start to think far more clearly about how a smart meter can complement and enhance the performance of the grid.  Rather than adding more customer centric “features”, it’s important that the meters and gateways can tell the grid how it’s working.  At the end of the day customers want a reliable grid first and foremost.  Shouldn’t we be specifying meters to achieve that, making them a true component of the smart grid, rather than turning them into another techie toy?

We need to step back from some of the more outlandish ideas and make sure we understand the basics.  That may mean a delay in deployments.  It may mean a generation of consultants will have a slightly more frugal retirement.  But, with luck, it may also mean the industry only has to do the job once.

It compares and contrasts the use of remote monitoring technology in the US and UK to support patients at home, both in terms of release from hospital and to manage long term chronic conditions.  Its main conclusion is that the UK is far better positioned to benefit from this than the US.  But there’s one proviso - that the UK needs to put in place a system that allows patient records to be shared between those involved in care, including the patients themselves.

The report acknowledges that this is currently lacking in the UK, but predicts that this will be remedied during the course of 2010 by the introduction on Summary Care Records (SCRs).

Pam’s obviously not spoken to the British GP’s Council.  This week their chairman - Laurence Buckmann, made a presentation to the Local Medical Committee’s Conference calling for SCRs to be scrapped, ostensibly because they require a patient to opt out, rather than opting in.  It’s part of an ongoing campaign against SCRs by the British Medical Association (BMA) that makes Luddites look progressive.  And which seriously threatens innovation within the NHS.

The Summary Care Record scheme is almost always prefaced in the media with the adjective “controversial”.  It’s not because patients find it controversial, but because of a well publicised storm that has been whipped up by members of the medical profession within the UK.  Ostensibly they fear for the security of patient data; their opposition is on the pretext that patients should opt-in, rather than being automatically included, with the option to opt out.  One would have thought that fifty years experience of getting patients to sign organ donor cards might have suggested that this would not work.  Look a little deeper and you see the underlying slyness.  Taking this approach is almost certain to ensure that only a small percentage of the population signs up, so that SCRs never achieve the critical mass to be successful.   It’s a cynical attempt to lobby for failure and to preservation the status quo.  Sadly, the new Government appears to have been sufficiently fooled by these views to call for a review of the scheme. 

Aside from their campaign to delay the project on the basis of security doubts, there’s a steady drip feed of comments suggesting that having accessible records will not provide any benefit.  On the British Medical Journal blog we hear that they are “unaware of any evidence that the SCR will dramatically improve care”.  A well publicised report from University College London reports “no direct evidence of an improvement to patient safety although findings were consistent with “a rare but important impact of the SCR on reducing medication errors”.

The UCL report, sensitively and non-provocatively titled “The Devil’s in the Detail”, highlights that “as of 1 March 2010, of the approximately 8.5 million people who had been sent information about the SCR, 0.65% had opted out. 1.2 million SCRs existed and 14,266 had been accessed.”  It observed that fewer people had registered than had been expected, explaining this on a “clunky” interface and complex registration process.  They failed to observe that a contributing reason may have been a vocal campaign by GPs, backed by the BMA, for people to boycott it and the fact that most local GP surgeries had not signed up, so you couldn’t actually set your SCR up.

Even where SCRs were used they experienced “wicked problems”, (I love the emotive use of words in this report - Wicked Problems is actually a chapter heading), foremost of which was tension over defining what data should be included.  In my experience, SCRs have been hampered by a largely academic debate over what they should contain.  Rather than trying them out and using an evidence base to see what is useful and what not, deployment is being pushed into committee rooms, whilst patients are left with a healthcare system that relies on shuffling mountains of paper around and repeating data inputs multiple times. 

What was also striking in the report, and I don’t know whether this is following practice or not, is the absence of patients from the design, governance and implementation networks.  The report claimed that it initially tried to measure whether the use of the SCR had contributed significantly to patients’ satisfaction, but abandoned this because they found it impossible to judge.  In other words it’s the same old story - Doctor knows best.  And at the point that the patient does get involved, Doctor tells them not to use it.

Once outside the GPs grasp, the report becomes more positive.  Amongst nurses, “the highest users of the PDA device were, unsurprisingly, those who considered themselves confident with the technology and were keen to innovate. The PDA aligned with such nurses’ identity and values (as a mobile workforce, they saw a mobile technology as very appropriate). Working in an organisation where they were not routinely given a simple mobile phone, they felt valued and rewarded when given the more technically sophisticated PDAs. High users of the PDA commented that they felt it increased their credibility in the eyes of the patient, partly because they could show the patient his or her own record at the bedside. It is possible, but only a hypothesis at this stage, that a demonstrable link with the main NHS records system made the nurses seem more a part of the trusted NHS system in the patient’s eyes.”

At that point it’s worth jumping across to the Healthcare at Home report.  Having compared US and UK practice, it concludes that shared health records are absolutely vital to its success.  It’s setting its hopes on the availability of SCRs in the UK to replicate the success in managing chronic disease management that it’s seen in the US.   They highlight the experience of the Veteran’s Association, which has used home telehealth, combined with case management for a number of years.  They’ve seen a 25% reduction in bed days, 20% reduction in admissions and an 86% patient satisfaction rating.  As a result they’re scaling up their approach to reach 110,000 patients by 2011.  (UCL please note - someone knows how to measure patient satidfaction.)

One of the most important messages this report brings back is the need to “Make every interaction count”.  It observes that where there is real benefit, particularly in a fragmented delivery system, such as is case with hospital, GP and social care in the UK, that we move from focussing on the particular function of each professional delivering an intervention to joining the dots, where each intervention can reinforce the others.  That means messages from previous visits can be constantly reinforced to help cement a health regime, whether that’s taking medication, appointment reminders or health measurements.  What they all need is the provision of consistent information, both to the patient and to each health professional they interact with.

Experience from California shows that in a lack of accessible medical information compromises quality and cost, and that the availability of data across organisational boundaries, as well as between clinician and patient, improves care (see the report for references). 

It is difficult to understand the antagonism of the BMA and GPs towards sharing information, other than as an attempt to maintain control of a hierarchy that owes its form to a Victorian Guild structure rather than a modern approach to evidence based medicine.  I think that many nurses understand the benefits.  But the higher you move up the professional chain, the more reluctance there is to accept that the patient is part of the solution, rather than being the raw material of the day job.

Sadly, it appears that the GPs have the ear of our new health minister - Simon Burns.  The Government has announced that they will ring-fence health spending, and it looks as if they’re also ring-fencing the ingrained prejudices of those within the NHS.  I’ve often referred reader to Clayton Christensen’s excellent book analysing the healthcare industry - the Innovator’s Prescription, and I’ll do so again.  He argues that the mix of healthcare professionals we will need in the future is different from the mix we have at present.  We’ll need fewer specialists, those we have will need to be better trained in intuitive medicine in a multi-disciplinary team environment, and that the work done today by general physicians will be taken over by nurse practitioners.

It is telling that in the UCL report, this last group was the one who found most benefit in SCRs.  That should have been an important part of the report’s conclusion.

In conclusion, if you happen to be Simon Burns, or someone who talks to him, or advise him, please realise that we do need Summary Care Records.  If you question why, go out and read the Innovator’s Prescription and then read the Healthcare at Home report.  Don’t listen to what the profession may be telling you - their agenda is one of survival.  Look at healthcare with disruptive eyes and think about the patient.  Ask why a GP has a stronger claim to ownership of that data than the patient themselves?  It needs to be accurate and trusted, but it also needs to be shared.  Patient accessible records are a vital component of giving people the joined-up healthcare system they deserve.  And it might even make it cheaper.

To be fair, ZigBee’s not the first to trademark the term.  Delaware Capital Formation are in on the act as well, but only with respect to machines, pumps and compressors.  So are Jetmax International, but they want it for solar powered lights and accumulators.  They also own it for hobby craft and educational kits.  Smartenergy Ltd of Illinois, (who, from their name would appear to have a stronger claim, and are courteous enough to elide the space between the words), own the use for heating and energy management devices and have done since 2005.  But TMI in Texas got there first, registering it for residential construction services the year before.

The utilities have been busy too, with the Northwest Natural Gas Company registering “Smart Energy” for gas utility services.  Dropping the space, SmartPak Equine use it for feed supplements for horses, which may or may not generate some more gas.

ZigBee claim that the first time the phrase “Smart Energy” was used in conjunction with wireless was the 22^nd January 2008.  That would probably surprise the Smart Energy Alliance, which was formed by Capgemini, Cisco, GE Energy, HP, Intel and Oracle back in 2006.  Of course, they’re all industry minnows, compared to the ZigBee Alliance, so it’s not surprising they never noticed its existence.

The cynical may look at this and think that ZigBee is staring into its crystal ball and foreseeing a future where the smart energy industry picks a different short range wireless standard.  Owning the trademark is then a cunning ploy that allows them to sue whoever else wins, preserving their legal department, even if their members don’t sell any chips.

ZigBee didn’t just stop at trade-marking Smart Energy.  It went and trade-marked “Smart Energy Profile” as well.  Sadly, that one has already passed its sell-by date, as ZigBee has moved to Smart Energy Profile 2.0.  Which they haven’t trade-marked!  So if anyone from Z-Wave, Wireless-MBUS, Wi-Fi or Bluetooth wants to jump on the bandwagon and spoil ZigBee’s game, they ought to rush out and trademark it now.

The question is, where will they stop?  Will they trade-mark “health care”, “remote control”, home automation” or “telecom services”?  They haven’t yet, but I bet they’re thinking about it. 

So prepare to be scared.  If someone knocks on your door and asks for your name, don’t tell them.  Don’t tell them your spouse’s name, your children’s, or even your pet’s.  If you’re lucky it will just be a Jehovah’s Witness.  If you’re not, it might be a ZigBee trademark lawyer, on his mission to own you and the world.

It’s a bit like the case of a child who has hitherto only been allowed chocolate on Christmas Day.  Now they’re being led into a chocolate factory and told they can eat as much as they want.  The inevitable result is a very happy child for a few hours, until they’re violently sick.  At which point they either vow never to eat another chocolate, or learn to treat it in a more sensible manner.

Today the medical industry and energy utilities are being shown the doors of the chocolate factory.  We have yet to see how they behave once they enter it.  Some may emerge as triumphant Charlies, but others risk becoming the commercial equivalent of Augustus Gloop and Veruca Salt.

The first point to address in this new world of data overload is the assumption that we’ll be able to do lots of useful things once we have this data.  There are lots of companies painting a picture of automated homes and lifestyle medical devices based on analysing this tsunami of data, but as yet we don’t know how much can be inferred from it, let alone how we will be able to use it to control other devices.  The assumption that having over a million times the volume of data every year (one reading every three seconds instead of one per year) is going to tell us anything useful is still exactly that - an assumption.  The nightmare scenario is that it doesn’t - it’s just random noise.

I fervently hope that’s not the case and that the data is useful, but to confirm that needs a lot more work.  mHealth and smart energy aren’t the only markets facing this problem - the U.S. military acknowledged it recently, when they said “we’re going to find ourselves swimming in sensors and drowning in data.” We are moving from drawing a straight line through two points to drawing one through a million of them.   At the most basic level, it involves a fundamental change in the underlying business model.  Both the medical profession and the energy utilities currently work on the assumption that if they hear nothing from us, they can ignore us for the next year.  Now they’ll be hearing from us every few seconds.  It’s not just the volume of data that is available, but the question of how to react to it.  That new granularity will show deviations from the straight line, whether it’s raised blood pressure or turning on the hosepipe to water the petunias.  What should a supplier do about it?

In the past, the safe route has been to ignore everything, not least because you don’t known about it, and it will probably have gone away by the time of the next data point.  Once you let the cat out of the bag and tell the consumer that you are monitoring their every move or cup of tea, then they will expect more feedback.  That means more resources on the part of the provider, which is likely to mean more cost.  Where’s the business model that supports that?

It suggests that the industry needs to step back from some of the more complex technology and fanciful gadget push that is appearing in the market and instead concentrate on answering the basic question.  Which is “what can I usefully do with the data”?  That means working with simple sensors that can collect the data, and back end systems that can then aggregate and mine it.  When the UK’s Technology Strategy Board was collecting input for their Assisted Living Innovation Program, I argued that they should do exactly that - deploy ten thousand or more sensors of whatever variety and concentrate on collecting and analysing the data.   I’m pleased to say that they’ve embraced that approach.

It is a critically important task for anyone who is moving into M2M (and that is essentially what mHealth and smart metering are).  You need to start by understanding your data.  Only when you have done that can you start to decide what value it has and whether a large scale deployment is justified.  That justification might be because it makes your business more efficient, it might be because you can offer additional services to your customer, or gain a competitive advantage, possibly by disrupting the market.  Or it could be because a government pays you to do it; but if they do, will they continue to pay the long term, day-to-day operating cost or working that data?

The problem is that you’re unlikely to know the answer to these questions until a year or more after you’ve deployed your first ten thousand devices and collected and analysed that year’s worth of data.  That’s a large initial expense with no immediate return. 

If the resulting business model is customer oriented, rather than profiting from internal business efficiencies, then it needs to include some compelling feedback if the user is going to want to continue to use it.   That in itself is a new area for both the medical and energy industries.  Neither use a language which the consumer understands, at least until the day the bill arrives.  Instead they stick to scientific jargon with BTUs, kWhrs, systolic and diastolic pressures. 

Consumers are far more interested in comparisons - for them these provide the compelling feedback.  That means simple comparisons such as “are we spending more than we were?”, “more than our neighbours are?”, “are we getting better?”, “should I have eaten that extra doughnut?” need to be developed.  None of these are the type of information that these industries have experience with, but if they are going to provide a compelling service they need to take into account customer psychology.  Even when that is done it may not have the desired effect, as evidenced by the recent report which found that when told they are using less energy than their neighbours, Republicans tend to compensate by increasing their energy usage.

To add another level of complexity, many of these comparisons raise privacy issues that are new to these industries.  Comparisons are normally more persuasive when they’re made with a group of peers, rather than just comparing past performance.  But how many companies are aware of what they are allowed to do in comparing an individual against data from other customers?  How much granularity can you use in comparisons with a neighbour?

Some companies are trying to leapfrog the data learning stage by selling a vision to customers.  A good example is Fitbit, who are using thir initial customers both to build their database and provide feedback.  However, for established businesses, which are those that will be supplying 99% of energy and healthcare users, that’s probably not an option.

Equally difficult is answering the question of how often feedback should be provided?  Should it be realtime - “turn it off now”, or after the event?  Should it affect when you are doing something, i.e. trying to change behaviour now, or retrospectively?  Even before we get to schemes such as energy shedding, which will turn off appliances, we need to know much more about the usage models behind data before bringing further automation into the picture.

These are difficult questions, both for new and established industries.  However, the fundamental order remains unchanged.  First you need to acquire the data.  Then you need to understand what it means.  Only then can you determine what that implies for your business model.  Keep an open mind and be flexible in building those business models.  Whether they be improved efficiency, customer retention, Government mandate, future sales through behavioural modification or company acquisition, they all need a company to take the time to understand the data and develop a consistent model.  Otherwise, you may look back and wish that you’d kept chocolate as a once a year treat, and never entered the chocolate factory.

The gulf between the enthusiasts and realists is wide.  It is worrying that much of the industry is rushing blindly towards deployment, with little understanding of the risks and what can be done to mitigate them. 

One of key mantras I keep on hearing repeated when security of the smart meter is raised is “why would anyone bother to hack it?”  Josh Wright, talking about ZigBee security at QuahogCon hit the nail on the head when he answered that.  “As an attacker, ZigBee lets me interact with the real world - that’s exciting.  I can interact with a dam, or natural gas distribution lines.  We’re looking at a wireless protocol that lets us interact with real things in the real world - it’s not just credit cards.”  The industry forgets the excitement that comes from “because I can” and “real things”  And it only needs a few people doing that to fuel scare stories that will kill the whole industry.

Let’s start with Josh.  He’s been looking at ZigBee security for some time and reporting on the issues, both of the standard and also of implementations.  Like many other wireless standards, ZigBee started off with fairly basic security.  Over the years they have added more and better ways of implementing security.  However, although these exist within the specification they’re not generally mandated and most ZigBee products on the market don’t implement all of them.  Even where they do, there may be errors in the protocol stacks which allow hacking attacks to succeed.

ZigBee’s not alone in this - every wireless standard has gone through the same process.  However, the issues only come to light once a standard starts to gain market traction and ship products in volume.  Hackers generally don’t bother with obscure or academic standards - they concentrate on the big shippers.  Up until now, ZigBee has not been widely used and has escaped scrutiny.  With its move into the big time, it’s starting to attract that attention.  And that attention is showing that a lot of what is in the market is seriously deficient.

You can see Josh’s presentation and also listen to it.  If you are working in the smart energy industry, I’d urge you to find 45 minutes to listen.  It is both entertaining and informative.  And scary.  Robert Cragie has posted some pertinent points about this presentation on his Gridmerge blog.

Last month the ZigBee Alliance asked for comments on its Smart Energy Profile 2.0.  It’s part of a new “open” process.  I hope that openness will involve publishing all of the comments, so that the industry as a whole can help scrutinise and drive the specification forward.  If you missed the deadline, you still have the opportunity to post comments on the draft specification itself, although that round closes on June 4^th.  If you do submit comments on any security issues, I would urge you to make them public as well, to get wider scrutiny.

ZigBee is by no means alone in this debate.  None of the low power wireless contenders vying for this space have had any real degree of external analysis.  That’s equally valid for Z-Wave, Wireless M-Bus and Bluetooth low energy.  All have written credible specifications, but none have been independently tested.  ZigBee is doing the right thing by being open about it, and the others need to follow that example.

Which brings me to the single chip.  If that seems an odd jump, it’s not, because the single chip suppliers are selling a dangerous belief, which is that you can make your meter cheaply now, taking advantage of the high levels of integration that are possible, and then upgrade it later.  The “jam tomorrow” story of upgradability is a very dangerous sticking plaster that is starting to be used to cover up any worries about security. 

Single chips will almost certainly be the way forward.  It’s the natural evolutionary path for electronics.  But it’s one that is normally taken after a standard settles down, particularly if portions of the standard go into ROM.  Because it’s driven by cost reduction, it normally means that the resources on the chip are limited to what is needed today, because unnecessary resource costs money.  As a guarantee against future problems, it’s a promise that doesn’t work.

The best specification for a smart meter that I’ve seen is the British Gas one.  It mandates upgradeability.  It also mandates a recovery procedure from a failed update, which is excellent and more far-sighted than most.  And it specifies a product lifetime of twenty years.   That’s nothing new for the metering industry.  But it represents multiple lifetimes for the wireless industry.  And that discrepancy is where we have the problem.

It’s informative to have a brief history lesson in order to understand what twenty years means.  If we look back to May 1990, the more advanced of us were running Windows 2.0, although many were still using DOS, or even GEM.   I’d recently bought a 286 based PC with a 20MB drive, thinking that would be all I ever needed.  No piece of software I buy today would run on that PC. 

Digital Mobile telephony was still a dream.  No mobile phone from 1990 would work today.  Five years later I was lucky enough to own a recently launched Nokia 2010, which still works on the GSM networks.  But unless you lived in Europe and were at the bleeding edge of GSM technology, then any phone you might have kept from 1995 is unlikely to work anywhere in the world today. 

In terms of short range wireless, everything was still a dream.  In 1995, Wi-Fi was seven years away.  It’s pre-cursor - 802.11 would arrive the following year, but operating a different frequency, so any PCMICA cards you might have bought then would not work with anything you could buy today.  And ZigBee, Bluetooth and 802.15.4 were nowhere on the horizon.

Go back just ten years and there’s not a lot of difference.  Most PCs were running Windows 95 or 98 and the first Bluetooth devices were on the market.  If you had one of those, it would still probably work with a current Bluetooth product, but at a base level of interoperability.  The original security features would still be working, but the more recent enhancements would not.  The first Wi-Fi / 802.11b products were beginning to emerge, but with security limited to WEP.  They would probably connect with current Wi-Fi products, but it would not be possible to upgrade them to work with the higher security of WPA, which is deemed essential today.  And ZigBee was still nowhere to be seen.

We need to regress a mere five years to 2005 to find the first ZigBee release and products.  They would be largely incompatible with today’s ZigBee PRO products and could not be upgraded to the security requirements of either of the Smart Energy Profiles.

Bluetooth and GSM have fared best in terms of long term compatibility and security.  Whether that is down to luck or judgement can be debated, but that’s not the point.  We forget just how quickly technology moves, and how, as it becomes endemic, hackers find flaws either in the standard or the implementations. 

The bottom line is that none of these early products can be upgraded to include what is considered best practice even five years later, let alone ten, fifteen or twenty.  And there’s the rub.  Upgradeability might allow a small improvement to security, but any major flaw is likely to require more resources than a highly optimised single chip contains. 

This is a fundamental factor of the rapid progress of technology and the smart meter business needs to understand it.  For the future of the industry we need to ensure that the security is as well tested as possible before we start deployments.  There are a lot of companies that want to ship in order to make money today, but that puts the entire industry at risk.

The other concern is that wireless upgrades are difficult.  I’ve been working in wireless for many years and my advice to customers is never to upgrade a product in the field.  With each upgrade a percentage of products will probably fail and that percentage will grow with each new upgrade.  Upgrading is not a panacea for cutting corners in the original design; it’s an open cheque-book for future support costs when the upgrade inevitably falls over.  It’s a subject that is glossed over, but sufficiently important that I’ve devoted half a chapter to it in my forthcoming book - The essentials of short range wireless.

We must not forget that throughout the history of metering, people have convinced themselves that there are ways of fiddling meters to falsify the readings, from rewiring them, adding magnets, inserting photographic film to act as a brake, using vacuum cleaners (gas meters) or magic devices that alter the spikes in your supply.  Once we add digital electronics and a wireless link, this band of amateur hackers will grow from a trickle to a flood as every engineering student tries to find a way of reducing their bill, or turning off their lecture hall lights.

There is no perfect solution - it will become a cat and mouse game, but we need to start from a position of strength.  Rushing to market is more likely to be a deployment of weakness, from which it will be difficult to recover.

It has all of the characteristics of the next technical bubble, but with the added benefit that, if we can make it work, it might actually save our healthcare systems from terminal meltdown. We need the disruption that mHealth will bring.  As Clayton Christensen points out in his seminal book - The Innovator’s Prescription, the only way we are going to effect a major change in healthcare is through the introduction of new, parallel business models to challenge those that our current healthcare structure is built on.  That will need new technologies that provide more effective diagnosis of symptoms, as well as devices that encourage personal participation in healthcare by putting monitoring and health records into the hands of patients.  Which are exactly the areas being targeted by the mHealth community.

However, there’s an invisible gorilla in the mHealth room that could consign the whole enterprise to history.  It’s called the FDA.  The FDA has the ability to apply regulations that would choke the development of mHealth.  Like all regulators, the FDA moves slowly - far more slowly than the emerging mHealth technology.  It is important for the industry to engage with it to reset the levels of regulation for mHealth.  What is worrying is that most of the noise around regulation is not about that resetting of expectations, but scare-mongering about the possible reaction of the FDA to an expansion of connected healthcare and new delivery methods.  It’s important that manufacturers understand the barriers that regulation might bring, but we’re at risk of crying “Wolf” to the extent that mHealth may never happen, or else only evolve outside the U.S.

Over the last six months, as the mhealth debate has progressed and new consumer applications have appeared on the market, I have seen a worrying trend for regulators to react to this new technology by making noises about the need for them to enlarge their sphere of regulation.  I’ve already argued that if consumer healthcare is to flourish we need a new patient manifesto that does exactly the opposite.  There are positive things happening - groups like the Continua Health Alliance are helping the FDA to understand the implications of mHealth, but that’s not a message that much of the industry is hearing.

Instead, legal firms and regulatory consultants are increasingly talking up the dangers that may exist within the compass of existing regulation.  Its effect is to reinforce the view that regulators are evil tyrants who may kill your business.  It may be implication and surmise, but it’s sowing exactly the wrong message that we need if we’re going to encourage disruption. 

If you’ve been reading the mHealth blogs or attending conferences, you’ll have come across the excellent articles by Bradley Merrill Thompson.  If you haven’t, you need to join some LinkedIn groups dealing in wireless or healthcare.  I’d urge you to do so, as he speaks a lot of sense and probably knows more about the FDA and its attitude to new technology than anyone else.  As well as being eminently knowledgeable, he’s an enjoyable speaker.  He wowed his audience at the recent Continua Summit and had them shaking in the corridors as they jumped at the imagined sound of FDA bogeymen behind every coffee urn.

Like his namesake, Bradley likes lobbing bricks to wake his audience up.  His message is that the FDA’s existing charter is so wide that the organisation could, if it wanted, regulate any device with a medical purpose, or indeed any part of that system.  If that seems like make-believe, it’s not.  It is deeply worrying to discover just how wide its remit actually is, and even more so to learn what its aspirations are in terms of increasing its sphere of influence.

For the medical industry we have today, that’s not necessarily considered to be a bad thing.  As with all regulation, the FDA helps to maintain the status quo, not least by providing a barrier to new entrants.  However, at a point where the industry needs disruption, that aversion to change threatens to stifle or deter innovation. 

To change that attitude, we desperately need to attract new entrants into the industry, as they have the most incentive to lobby for regulatory change.  It’s an approach that has risks - it will almost certainly mean that we let in some of the more dubious ends of the medical spectrum.  But the alternative - maintaining, or even increasing the current level of regulation, will inhibit disruption and lead to a system that cannot serve the changing population demographics. 

I’ve argued that if personal healthcare is to move forwards, we need less rather than more regulation.  A level of dodgy, alternative mHealth may be the price we have to pay if we are going to make serious progress.  And regulators will hate it, as not only will it potentially remove some of their powers, it also means that new entrants, who are not part of the established medical club will try to tell them how to do their job.  But to achieve any of this, we need to persuade manufacturers outside the health sector to come and join in and help put pressure on the regulators.

Experts like Bradley are telling the story as it is, warning manufacturers new to the market of the potential issues with regulation.  However, without any firm signs of movement from the FDA, endlessly repeating the warnings of impending doom sends a signal to new entrants to avoid the market, or at least the US market.   As a result, I worry about the number of companies that are should be thinking about entering the healthcare market, but are putting their plans on hold.  Without their voices, it will be slower and more difficult to lobby for regulatory change.

We need to ensure that message gets across, but that message needs to be used to argue for a reduction in regulatory power, rather than putting the fear of God into potential disruptors.  Otherwise we risk stopping investment and innovation.

Patient centric and regulated medicine currently live at diametrically opposed ends of the regulatory scale.  The patient centric end needs more proponents to push its cause.  There is much that the mobile industries can bring to the table, as their business model is firmly based on being user centric.  They need to be encouraged in their new foray into healthcare and taught how to engage with the regulators to find common ground.  Not worried, otherwise they will put their effort into other ventures.

It is, of course, far easier to live with the limitations imposed by a regulator and make good consultancy income from advising companies on how to work around them, rather than getting the regulators to move to meet the market demand.  As Bradley puts it in one of his presentations “Arguing with a lawyer is like mud wrestling with a pig: after a while you realize the pig actually enjoys it.”  But mHealth needs those barriers to be moved, and to achieve that we need to encourage as many companies as possible to come to the table.  It may be hard; it may take time; but if we just stress the difficulties and dangers we may never attain that critical mass, which may endanger the whole future of mHealth.

Outside the confines of the technical working groups, Bluetooth low energy is still a fairly well kept secret.  Yet it has the potential to overtake Bluetooth usage in just a few years, growing to a volume of multiple billions of chips per year.  It is the only wireless technology that has the potential to challenge and surpass the shipment volumes of cellular.  Yet even within the Bluetooth community, there are many that have not yet understood this potential.

One of the reasons for that lack of understanding is that Bluetooth low energy is a wireless standard for a new generation of applications.  Every previous wireless standard comes from the mindset of being a cable replacement which connects devices that never change their behaviour.  That is true even if there’s a mesh involved.  And it’s the way that most products were designed until a year or two ago. 

Two things have changed that.  The first is the concept of machine-to-machine communications where products connect directly to the Internet.  The second is the emergence of the Apps store, where handset owners can download and install new features every day.  Bluetooth low energy has a new architecture that fits both of these models.  Even more importantly, it allows them to converge.  As such, it is the first wireless technology designed for the second decade of this century.  Here’s why…

Today almost no products in the consumer space are designed that connect to the internet.  It may be possible to connect them to a PC and from there to a web application, but they invariably look as if the internet connection is an afterthought.  In the future, as it becomes simple to make devices connect and communicate with a web application we will see some fundamental changes.  Designers will be able to consider the web connection as a core part of its functionality.  Without it the product will be as useless as it would be without its power supply.  A few companies have pioneered this approach using Wi-Fi, notably the Nabaztag rabbit, the Withings scale and the Chumby radio alarm but none have yet made it to the mainstream, not least because they’re still difficult to set up.

Bluetooth low energy promises to change that.  From a performance point of view, it’s optimised for very low power devices, that can run from coin cells for months or years.  It is limited to small amounts of data, but it compensates by providing a way for products to automatically connect to the net.  Moreover, it’s very small, so it can be squeezed into almost anything we user, or even wear.

It makes internet connectivity easy by allowing a device to be pre-programmed with the web site or service it needs to connect to.  Once it is paired to a phone or another gateway device, it asks the gateway to provide a secure link to that website.  From that point, the gateway acts like a pipe, allowing the device and web application to communicate with each other.  Every time the device has data to send, it just sends it.

It’s a scheme that means that almost any device can be designed to be web connected.  There are some obvious first examples, such as sports and fitness equipment, smart meters and consumer healthcare products.  In some cases they will connect via a mobile phone, in others through a home gateway.  In areas like home automation and smart energy, Bluetooth low energy offers some real advantages.  The radio has been redesigned to improve the range, but retains the Adaptive Frequency Hopping of Bluetooth.  That makes it very robust against interference in the 2.4GHz band, something that is a major concern to smart meter manufacturers.

Although for many users, the phone will act as a transparent pipe, Bluetooth low energy also provides the phone with information that helps it choose the best downloadable applications for the device. So rather than the user having to work out which applications work with their new product, the phone can interrogate it and automatically fetch a list of those it knows will work.  Making it easy is an important tool in making those products fun and desirable.

For users it opens up a whole new world of accessories that can work with their phone.  For operators it allows them to move past the handset and offer services that no longer need the user to touch the keypad of their handset.

And that’s just the first step.  As designers start to understand that they can embed sensors into all sorts of devices, we’ll see innovative new products that measure and do things we’d not expected.  In healthcare, that may be by adding sensors to everyday objects.  For the socially networks, that may be beer glasses that automatically tot up your consumption on your Facebook page.  For product design it will signal a step change in design possibilities similar to that which came with the introduction of the microprocessor.

Members of the Bluetooth SIG (and that’s over 13,000 of the world’s largest companies) can access the specification now.  If you’re not a member, it’s free to join at www.bluetooth.org.  The chip companies are confident that they’ll have development kits available by the summer, so now’s the time start thinking about what an internet connection would mean for your product.