The following are news announcements made during the past week by the following organizations:
Smartrac;
Arm, Stream Technologies;
Stanley Healthcare, Extronics;
STMicroelectronics;
People Power;
Homerton University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, Idox Health;
Techstars, and BHS.
Smartrac Expands NFC Portfolio for Challenging Applications
Smartrac has announced that it is extending its portfolio of Near Field Communication (NFC) products. While its recently introduced Circus Flex and Circus Dura tags offer environmental resistance for brand and retail applications, the company’s On-Metal products allow for efficient tagging of metal surfaces in industrial and automotive applications.
The Circus Flex uses a “glop top” seal that shields the IC and its connection to the antenna, and was designed in response to customer demand for highly protected flexible tags, according to the company. The Circus Dura, meanwhile, is intended for highly protected stiff tags. Stiffness and flexibility tend to be mutually exclusive, the firm explains, and with these stress-resistant inlays and tags, brands and retailers can choose which suits their needs.
Companies across a variety of industries, such as industrial and automotive, need to tag metallic parts, tools, machines, equipment or metal doors, and hence require flexible on-metal NFC inlays for wide-ranging surfaces. Smartrac thus offers ferrite-based NFC inlays that are flexible enough to suit roll-to-roll manufacturing processes.
The new, thin, ferrite-based inlays are produced by applying a layer of this material to an inlay, isolating the magnetic field from the metal surface. Because they offer greater flexibility compared to conventional ferrite-based NFC tags, Smartrac claims, the On-Metal NFC inlays and tags can be used on a wider range of metallic surfaces—concave, convex, roughened, rugged or grainy—and can be read by a mobile phone app or NFC reader. In addition, converters can overprint the inlays if required.
According to Smartrac, applications involving metal surfaces that need to be identified or interacted with include asset management, product authentication, grey market detection, warranty activation, planned service and maintenance instructions, spare parts ordering and feedback for product development. Additionally, consumer goods made from metal can now be NFC-enabled as well.
“By extending our NFC portfolio in response to the needs of our customers, such as brand owners and retailers as well as industrial and automotive clients, we are not only expanding Smartrac’s position as the NFC technology and innovation leader,” said Matti Tavilampi, Smartrac’s director of RFID sensors and products for global product management, in a prepared statement. “We are also broadening our range of customer-oriented RFID-based Internet of Things solutions by leveraging our new products’ capabilities.”
The ferrite layer option will be made available across a range of Smartrac HF and NFC products, and will initially be offered for Circus and BullsEye antenna types equipped with NXP‘s NTAG213 IC. BullsEye On-Metal and Circus On-Metal are slated to be made available in July 2018, while Circus Flex and Circus Dura tags are available in large quantities now.
Arm Acquires Stream Technologies, Releases IoT Device-Management Platform
Arm has announced that its Mbed IoT Device Management Platform allows companies to derive business value from Internet of Things (IoT) data to achieve greater efficiencies, faster time to market, cost savings and new revenue streams. The solution enables organizations to securely develop, provision and manage connected devices at scale.
The next generation of the platform is now under way, the company reports, with its acquisition of Stream Technologies, whose solutions will be integrated with the platform to enable the connectivity management of any device, regardless of location or network. Stream Technologies supports physical connectivity across all major wireless protocols—such as cellular, LoRa, Satellite and so forth—that can be managed via a single user interface. Connecting all IoT devices is important, the company explains, in ensuring that data is accessible at the appropriate time and cost, across any use case.
Founded in 2000, Stream Technologies is a connectivity management technology provider that maintains more than 770,000 managed subscribers and 2TB average traffic per day. Stream’s solutions allow companies to create supply chains in which they can locate IoT devices or networks, self-authenticate, automatically provision and connect to the lowest-cost channel, thereby removing the need to interface with multiple systems and develop several business contracts.
The combination of Stream’s technology with Arm’s Mbed IoT Device Management Platform, the company indicates, will provide organizations with an IoT platform for managing, connecting, provisioning and updating devices that is easily scalable and flexible. In addition, Stream will work with GSMA-compliant Embedded Subscriber Identity Module (eSIM) solutions, including Arm Kigen and partner SIM solutions, to ensure secure identity and optimal connectivity for IoT devices. According to Arm, the addition of Stream accelerates its mission of securely managing IoT complexities from chip to cloud, enabling customers to focus their efforts on deriving actionable insights from the data generated by connected devices.
Stanley Healthcare, Extronics Forge Multi-Year Partnership Agreement
Stanley Healthcare and Extronics have signed a multi-year partnership agreement, building on a global distribution agreement forged in October 2015. This new agreement positions Extronics as the exclusive provider of AeroScout products and solutions to global customers in industrial markets, including oil and gas, chemical, pharmaceuticals, petrochemical and mining.
“I’m absolutely delighted to formalize this long-term relationship in a landmark agreement that will mutually benefit our companies and our customers,” said John Hartley, Extronics’ CEO, in a prepared statement. “This is a key part of Extronics’ next phase of growth in the years to come, as the industrial market digitalizes their operations and worker safety increases in importance.”
Extronics has worked with AeroScout technology since 2005. The company reports that its expertise with the technology, and with working in hazardous areas and industrial environments, will enable it to guide Stanley Healthcare’s development in real-time location system (RTLS) hardware and software. Extronics is also investing heavily in its own R&D, creating new RTLS products designed specifically to suit industrial applications and leveraging Stanley Healthcare’s RTLS platform.
“We’re not only investing in the technology, but also in the manpower to provide world-class support,” said Phil Walker, Extronics’ COO, in the prepared statement. “This agreement serves as an endorsement of our Technical Services team, which provides global support and services coverage to non-healthcare customers up to and including 24/7 assistance.”
STMicroelectronics Unveils IoT Firmware-Development Tool
STMicroelectronics has announced that its AlgoBuilder tool is designed to take the coding out of firmware development by letting users build sensor-control algorithms graphically with library modules, ready to compile and run on an STM32 microcontroller (MCU). AlgoBuilder is available now and can be downloaded for free.
Created to simplify the development of Internet of Things (IoT) devices containing ST’s MEMS sensors and MCUs, AlgoBuilder helps users quickly get a proof-of-concept model up and running. Users can build their algorithms quickly and intuitively by dragging and dropping selected functions, connecting the blocks and configuring properties. AlgoBuilder validates all design rules and automatically generates C code based on the graphical design.
Leveraging ST’s STM32 microcontrollers and MEMS sensors, including motion and environmental sensors and silicon microphones, AlgoBuilder provides libraries such as logic and mathematical operators, signal processing, user inputs and vector operations. Turnkey algorithms for commonly used functions are included, such as sensor hub, motion-sensor calibration, activity recognition, motion intensity and pedometer. Users can also add their own custom functions to the AlgoBuilder libraries.
AlgoBuilder provides an environment for connecting software libraries with other logic, the company reports, in order to create a complete firmware project ready to compile using an STM32 IDE (Integrated Development Environment), such as TrueSTUDIO for STM32, SW4STM32 System Workbench for STM32, IAR-EWARM IAR Embedded Workbenchfor Arm, and Keil µVision MDK-ARM-STM32.
AlgoBuilder can generate firmware for deployment on various STM32 platforms. These include NUCLEO-F401RE and NUCLEO-L476RG development boards with an X-NUCLEO-IKS01A2 MEMS-sensor expansion board, as well as sST’s SensorTile IoT module. The SensorTile integrates a STM32L476JG ultra-low-power microcontroller, motion and environmental MEMS sensors, and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) connectivity.
Users can test their firmware by launching the Unicleo-GUI application from within AlgoBuilder, in order to display outputs from running firmware. Unicleo-GUI, a dedicated sensor graphical user interface for use with ST’s sensor expansion software packages and X-NUCLEO boards, lets users visualize sensor data as a time plot, scatter plot or 3D plot.
IoT Software Provider People Power Achieves GDPR Compliance
People Power, an Internet of Things (IoT) software company providing white-label solutions for home, security, energy and care, has announced that it has achieved compliance with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), enabling it to ensure consumer data privacy for IoT solutions.
Enabling privacy for all individuals within the EU, GDPR addresses the export and management of personal data beyond member state boundaries, giving citizens and residents control of their personal data and simplifying the regulatory environment for international business. Incorporating the privacy by design approach, People Power has enabled auditing and compliance controls to administer GDPR-compliant data processing for business partners offering the company’s white-label IoT solutions to their customers.
“For smart homes to become truly intelligent, user data collection and analysis is a necessity. That doesn’t mean a privacy tradeoff should exist,” said Gene Wang, People Power’s CEO, in a prepared statement. “To the contrary, smart home data demands more protection than ever before. Unlike companies that sell user data for advertising or research purposes, we never will. It’s a person’s home, so it’s their data. With GDPR compliance, our connected home services allow users complete control of their own data.”
To help oversee GDPR compliance and the company’s data-protection strategy, People Power has named John Teeter, the firm’s chief scientist, as its data protection officer. Teeter was previously a Presidential Innovation Fellow at the White House, where he participated in both My Data and Open Data initiatives within the Executive Branch of the Federal Government, in addition to driving innovation at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the General Services Administration (GSA).
Homerton University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust Deploys Asset-Tracking Technology from Idox Health
Homerton University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust has announced its rollout of Idox Health‘s medical tracking software, which the company describes as instrumental in revolutionizing equipment management across its site. The implementation of iAssets, part of the iFIT logistics management suite, has provided tools to enable medical assets to be tracked, located and utilized more efficiently than before, the hospital reports.
With the support of iAssets, ward audits have been simplified, giving personnel greater visibility and allowing equipment to be retrieved in a timely manner. The Trust has also been able to reduce procurement costs significantly, increase planned preventative rates by 15 percent and discontinue an £80,000 ($106,000) annual maintenance agreement after the solution identified the equipment covered was no longer in service.
“iAssets has been instrumental in turning around our medical equipment management,” said Brian Long, the Trust’s head of medical electronics, in a prepared statement. “We can now locate our equipment easily and quickly. In the past, if an item was moved out of the library or between departments in the middle of the night, we wouldn’t know where to find it in the morning. After implementation and when items were no longer going missing, we discovered that we were overstocked. We have been able to reduce our inventory procurement level by 25%.”
Techstars, BHS Announce Mentorship-driven IoT Accelerator for Europe
Techstars, a worldwide network that helps entrepreneurs fund their ventures, has announced a new partnership with BSH, a manufacturer of home appliances, to bring a new mentorship-driven accelerator program to Munich, Germany. The program is known as BSH Future Home Accelerator Powered by Techstars.
This is the fifth Techstars mentorship-driven accelerator program in Germany, following other successful programs carried out in Berlin. Techstars is now seeking a wide range of technologies, including the Internet of Things (IoT) and radio frequency identification (RFID).
BSH and Techstars are seeking innovative startup companies from around the globe that will bring pioneering technologies to change the way in which digital consumers live, cook and do housework, especially in the heart of the future home: the connected kitchen. The companies will be supported throughout the mentorship-driven accelerator program with educational content, and by a team of mentors offering subject-matter expertise, business connections and access to resources.
BSH includes such global brands as Bosch, Siemens, Gaggenau and Neff. The selected companies will benefit from the firm’s experience and knowledge, as well as an installed base of more than a million connected-home appliances. Applications for the accelerator will open on July 23, 2018, and the program is expected to kick off in Munich in February 2019. Startups interested in applying should review the Application Toolkit.