At the beginning of this year many articles were published discussing the trend of wearable computing. Forbes asked, “Wearable Technology: A Fad Or The Future?” and Financial Times pointed to wearables as a top trend at CES 2014. Wearable computing is part of the growth within the larger realm of machine to machine (M2M) and the Internet of Things. Google Glass and Galaxy Gear have already been in the spotlight for the past year, and it has become somewhat common to see people wearing health tracking devices from Fitbit, Nike and Jawbone. More recently we are seeing launches of smart brooches and smart collars for your dog. It seems like every company at Mobile World Congress 2014 had some announcement about new or upcoming wearables.
Built to innovate
Lance Howarth, CEO of the Raspberry Pi foundation, didn’t announce a new wearable, but he did say that Raspberry Pi was founded in order to democratize computing and inspire a generation. The founders wanted to ensure that people had access to technology that was accessible enough for anyone to innovate.
I first heard about Raspberry Pi while participating in a technology update day for one of the larger enterprises in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Initially I assumed that Raspberry Pi was another distribution of Android joining its Ice Cream Sandwich and KitKat versions. In an earlier blog post, Paul Brody described Raspberry Pi as “a credit card-sized computer that integrates with physical devices like TVs and keyboards to give users PC functionality, such as spreadsheets and word processing, without having to buy a computer.”
Several interesting use cases were showcased at the technology update. Some people are using these devices in conjunction with wireless communications components to create cheap smart metering solutions. Others are using them to create home media servers or build custom home automation solutions. By clustering a number of these devices together you can create a supercomputer. Some folks are running IBM Websphere Liberty Profile and IBM Worklight on Raspberry Pi.
Farm of the future
During the open discussion, one of the business units asked about a use case they are trying to assess.
The agriculture industry has made amazing progress over the years in creating a reliable supply of food. One of the challenges that has come with this success is the reduction in biodiversity. As we continue to breed animals that are increasingly similar to each other, we also increase the risk that they will react in the same way to germs and disease. If one of the animals gets sick, hundreds or thousands of animals can quickly be affected by the same illness.
This can translate into disruption of food supply and losses of significant revenue. The business unit this question came from deals with agriculture, and one of their ventures is a pig farm. They were asking about the heat generated by wearable devices and the wireless components. The reason this is important is that they want to attach a device to each of the pigs—similar to the smart collar for dogs mentioned above. The devices will be used to monitor heart rate, body temperature and some other information. But, because the environment where the pigs are raised isn’t sterile and is exposed more to the elements, the devices need to be enclosed in a strong case. If the devices give off a lot of heat then they could be damaged by the heat. Leveraging IBM WebSphere MQ Telemetry (MQTT) can help reduce the battery consumption and thus the heat.
As information is collected from each pig it can be wirelessly transmitted back to a data center. In the data center, near-real-time analysis will be able to identify that a specific pig is getting sick. The sooner a sick pig is identified and removed from the drift, the less impact there will be on other pigs. So now when we talk about the Internet of Things, some of those things will be cars and meters, and some of those things will live on Old MQTTonald’s Farm and form the Internet of … pigs?!
Do you have unique examples of how wearables and Internet of Things are being applied to food safety and the reliability of our supply networks? Have you seen any interesting M2M implementations at MWC? Shoot a tweet to @davidleeheyman and tell me about it!
#M2M to #P2P, Machine 2 Man to Pi 2…Pigs? http://ibm.co/NoAd2z
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