Imagine a bridge built with sensors in its concrete. For decades, the sensors report back to a network that all's well. Thenone day, they raise an alarm that stress has been detected.
CRISTINA MARTINEZ BYVIK / Union-Tribune
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Or imagine a patient rushed to the hospital with chest pains. A small wristband from a San Diego company monitors her vital signs and wirelessly transmits them to the hospital from the ambulance. In the waiting room, her condition suddenly worsens. The sensors on her wrist trigger an alarm, and she is rushed in to see the doctors.
Then there's the new smart meter system being installed by San Diego Gas & Electric. The gas meter talks to the electric meter, which reports back to SDG&E headquarters. In addition to billing information, the system alerts officials of power outages. In the future, it's expected to work with networked thermostats and other controllers to reduce consumption – and save customers money – during peak demand times, when rates are higher.
Increasingly, our machines are talking to each other. Our world is being monitored. Actions are being taken without human interaction. With several different names – machine-to-machine communications, or M2M; smart services; or the Internet of things – the combination of widely available networks and inexpensive electronics, such as sensors and radio identification tags, is bringing science fiction ideas to life.
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COMMON TERMS
M2M: Shorthand for machine-to-machine or machine-to-man communications. Refers to information sent from sensors and radios typically to computer systems for analysis and storage. Often tasks are completed without human action. For example, a GPS navigation system continually checks in with orbiting satellites, calculates its location and updates a display.
Smart services: Used more often to refer to businesses based on M2M. For example, a service charges a monthly fee for providing a GPS device to parents or pet owners to track a child or pet's location.
Internet of things: Refers to the merging of cyberspace and the real world created when items are given radio identification tags (RFID) and are monitored by networks. For example, a warehouse can update its inventory when a box of RFID-tagged items is added or removed.
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In the example above, San Diego company Triage Wireless is designing what some call “smart Band-Aids,” a system for continuous monitoring of vital signs. Instead of intermittent checks of blood pressure, the smart system would send a stream of measurements over a hospital's wireless network.
Triage backers include Intel, the computer chip maker, and Qualcomm, the San Diego wireless technology company.
A somewhat similar concept is being developed by San Diego company Cardio Net. The firm has developed technology connecting heart monitors to a wearable wireless device that links to cellular data systems and ultimately to a medical monitoring network.
The system allows patients to leave the hospital while providing physicians with extended monitoring that the company says is more effective in detecting heart arrhythmias.
Michigan company Crayon Interface is developing a system that allows people to monitor or adjust home thermostats and remotely lock or unlock their homes using their cell phones.
John Deere is incorporating systems in farm equipment that combine GPS location information with a database of land contours, allowing the system to lay out the best course of plowing or planting.
At Qualcomm, Vice President of Smart Services Steve Pazol said the original name “M2M” was a little too geeky for many. But whatever you call it, it's a market poised for growth.
“We call it smart services because M2M wasn't resonating with the business community,” Pazol said. “It's an area of new businesses having connected products, and it's a market on the cusp of moving into the mainstream.”
Market research firm Strategy Analytics expects the mobile M2M market to grow from less than $16 billion this year to more than $57 billion by 2014.
Qualcomm is interested in M2M in part because many of the services will use wireless networks, which will mean more Qualcomm chips or licenses. In addition, Pazol's division provides services to M2M companies. Cardio Net, for example, has expertise in medical devices but essentially outsources the wireless networking portion of its business to Qualcomm.
Pazol sees a hierarchy of connected devices. At the top are items such as nuclear power plants where no one is going to worry about including a modem that costs more than $5. In the middle are devices such as automated utility meters. There's probably a good case for a modem that costs $5 or more if utilities don't have to pay workers to read meters.
At the bottom are inexpensive electronics such as toaster ovens. It obviously makes no sense to add $5 to the cost of a product that retails for less than $40.
But if the price of that modem drops low enough, the question gets more interesting, Pazol said.
“Will it ever make sense to put a modem in a toaster oven? That's hard to say.”
A popular networking concept called Metcalf's law suggests that a network's value grows exponentially as the number of nodes rises. Adding a toaster oven to a home network could add to the usefulness of the network in some unforeseen way, he said.
“People will come up with a lot of these services after devices are already connected,” Pazol said.
One prominent example of these after-the-fact services involves the transponders used to pay toll-road fees, which debuted in 1989.
A few years ago, Houston-area transportation agency TranStar came up with a bright idea. Why not collect information from the thousands of cars traveling around with EZ-Tag toll-road transponders to monitor traffic?
As a result, the agency uses the toll-road hardware to generate data for a free, real-time, online map of typical highway speeds. A similar project in the Bay Area uses GPS signals from cell phones and navigation hardware to calculate traffic speeds.
While Pazol and others expect there are many other services to be discovered, not everyone agrees. Iain Gillott, president of Austin, Texas, wireless market research firm iGR, doesn't put much stock in the “build it and the ideas will come” theory.
“I get a little fuzzy when you start talking about lawn sprinklers and toaster ovens,” he said.
Car manufacturers developed anti-skid systems that make use of the car's ABS braking computer and related hardware, Gillott said.
“They basically added software and charged you a couple thousand dollars,” he said. “The ABS was already there being used. They didn't say, 'Let's put in an ABS system and find a use for it later.'”
Many San Diego consumers will come into contact with M2M services as a result of SDG&E's smart meter program. The utility has begun installing the devices in Tierrasanta and plans to replace all 1.4 million meters in its system by 2011. The meters will include a short-range radio technology called ZigBee, which will link the meter to devices such as thermostats inside homes and businesses.
The utility is still reviewing the various ZigBee devices and services it may offer, said Alex Kim, director of customer innovations.
SDG&E might offer “convenience-type applications,” Kim said, such as home networks that would alert residents that a garage door was left open and let them remotely close it by sending instructions to the smart meter.
In one energy-saving scenario, a customer could set parameters on power use, specifying energy conservation steps such as raising the thermostat setting a few degrees in summer if the price of electricity rose above a certain point.
When peak rates kicked in, SDG&E computers would send instructions to the smart meter, which would relay those instructions to the smart thermostat. The consumer would save money without effort and the utility would reduce peak demand.
Other customers might not want the process to be fully automated but might want an e-mail or text message during a “high-price event,” he said.
“Some people want options,” Kim said. “Others want to set it and forget it. Ultimately, it's a customer decision either way.”
Jonathan Sidener: (619) 293-1239;
jonathan.sidener@uniontrib.com
