Why 2017 should be the year of the Smart Highway

broadcast room

Why 2017 should be the year of the Smart Highway

5 minutes

Over the past 12 months, new technology and pilot projects have generated incredible interest in smart infrastructure and autonomous vehicles. Developments range from driverless cars navigating city streets in the U.S., Japan and Europe to announcements of advanced technology that will speed developments in both autonomous vehicles and smart infrastructure.

In late November, the auto industry rolled into In Los Angeles, a city that stands for America’s car culture, for a trade show that debuted new models and brought together tech companies, automakers, investors and government officials to talk about the new mobility ecosystem.

Remaking transportation and mobility

Panasonic Corp. of North America Chairman and CEO Tom Gebhardt delivered a keynote at Automobility LA on macro technology trends remaking transportation and mobility. He talked about electrification of the powertrain. He predicted that by 2022, the price of electric vehicles is expected to be about the same as their internal combustion counterparts, creating a tipping point. Already Panasonic is a global leader in EV batteries. The company is investing to create economies of scale, helping to shape the transition to carbon-zero engines.

Mr. Gebhardt also touched on automotive connectivity, another disruptive technology remaking transportation and mobility. Carmaker revenue streams could increase by 30% with mobility services, he estimated. Those systems are expected to serve as the central, connected data hub in the near future.

Unveiling a connected vehicle ecosystem in Colorado

In Colorado, vehicle and road connectivity is at the center of efforts to improve traveler safety and reduce traffic jams. In Denver, Panasonic has created a connected vehicle ecosystem that collects travel data from cars and other sources and communicates that information to vehicles and external systems. The system comes out of a collaboration between Panasonic and the Colorado Dept. of Transportation to create the first production-grade, U.S. connected vehicle system in which real-time data would be shared across vehicles, infrastructure and people with a goal to improve safety, lower fuel consumption and reduce congestion. The promise from efforts such as those taking place in Colorado are extraordinary. IoT linked roads are expected to reduce travel times by almost half, and potentially eliminate up to 80% of crashes.

And that is why 2017 should be declared the year of the Smart Highway. The humble road, the most basic infrastructure has now become pivotal to the future of transportation. The New York Times Magazine recently devoted a whole issue to a new world of autonomous cars and how paired with smart roads they will impact almost everything from our cities to our car culture to our time: “This technology could change the way we live, with first- and second- and third-order effects that boggle the mind.” Those mind-boggling effects will shape tech discussions in 2018.

Authors
Jarrett Wendt - Executive Vice President, Strategic Initiatives at Panasonic Enterprise Solutions Company

Building a wireless future that is far-reaching and accessible

Future of wireless

Building a wireless future that is far-reaching and accessible

4 minutes

The most inspiring example of the power of mesh networks, a distributed communication system, where each device acts as a node that can relay data to the others, lies in the island of Puerto Rico. That’s where a couple of volunteers with antennas, wireless mesh devices and solar panels helped to restore communications for relief effort coordinators in Barranquitas, a city battered by Hurricane Maria. “Within three days, volunteers were using both technologies to more effectively coordinate the delivery of food and medicine,” according to an article in Quartz.

Disaster management and public safety is one reason for the strong growth forecast for the global wireless mesh network market, but not the only one, according to a new report by Zion Market Research. Its study finds that the global wireless mesh network market was valued at $3.84 billion in 2017 and is expected to reach around $9.08 billion by 2024. The oil & gas Industry, video streaming and surveillance, smart mobility and smart city applications are among the biggest drivers of growth of mesh networking thanks to its promise of low-cost access to broadband services.

Bluetooth 5.0 was officially deployed in 2016 with a focus on enhancing the range, speed and data capacity for the connections. It also had another promising role: IoT connectivity. Where Bluetooth had previously been thought of as a 1-to-1 connection between devices, this concentration on IoT tech allows for the connection of multiple devices and, ultimately, the cloud.

Recent research on disruptive technology by Panasonic shows that many companies have adopted mobile devices, apps and commerce and the cloud, and three in five have adopted the Internet of Things (IoT). Senior tech decision makers believe these technologies are critical to their future success, according to our research. Clearly developments, such as mesh networking, that yield fruitful deployments of disruptive technology are important to these decision makers.

Wide-ranging applications

Bluetooth mesh network represents a major step towards a more accessible and wide-ranging wireless future. It allows for multiple devices to connect to the same network and all communicate seamlessly and in real time. A standard Bluetooth network is similar to a speaker presenting to an audience. The speaker may address the entire audience or individual members and audience members may address a question to the speaker, but audience members don’t communicate among themselves. In a Bluetooth mesh network audience members may address one another. This topology has two advantages. First, since a single message may travel along many routes to its destination, this dramatically increases the probability that the message arrives. The second advantage is the increased distance a message may travel – like one audience member speaking to another.

While standard Bluetooth recently upgraded its range in the Bluetooth 5.0 update, mesh networking hypothetically allows for infinite range if the proper chain links are in place.

Mesh networks in healthcare

There are pioneering Bluetooth mesh network examples in healthcare. Hospitals are using Bluetooth beacons to monitor and track equipment. But helping nurses locate equipment is just the surface of Bluetooth’s capabilities in the health system. Using this tech, doctors and nurses could monitor patients from anywhere, significantly reducing the need for hospital visits. These visits are both costly and potentially dangerous due to the risk of things like contagious diseases and infection. Not only would a doctor or nurse be able to monitor patients wirelessly, but a patient’s devices at home could do things like monitor temperature through biometric sensors and automatically notify the drug store to deliver medicine if the patient got a fever.

Benefits to manufacturing

There are also clear benefits from the Bluetooth mesh network in the manufacturing sector, especially where multiple machines operate simultaneously on the plant floor. Previously, if two devices situated beyond the range of a Bluetooth device needed to communicate, it would require either a wired connection or gateway that could connect to the cloud. This cloud connection requires Wi-Fi, which uses significantly more energy. Now with the mesh network, every single device in the entire factory can connect to each other via Bluetooth, and even the ones farthest away can communicate if necessary by bouncing the signal through other devices on the way.

Bluetooth mesh networking is just one piece of the wireless future that is to come.

Authors
Jeff Howell - President of Panasonic Industrial Devices Sales Company of America

The eyes have it: biometrics in travel

Biometrics eye scan

The eyes have it: biometrics in travel

4 minutes

Imagine a world of air travel, where the only things you need to board a plane are your luggage and yourself. No more worries about forgotten tickets or passports. If trends continue, it’s easy to see how in airports and air travel, biometric technology, such as fingerprint scanning, facial recognition, or even microchips inserted under the skin, could be used to speed the journey.  
It may happen sooner than you think, as travelers begin to expect what they already use in other industries.

With customer experience and convenience serving as major drivers for the adoption of biometrics, market research firm Goode Intelligence predicts that biometrics will be employed by 1.9 billion banking customers over the next two and a half years. If the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show is anything to go by, we’ll soon be relying on biometrics to access our cars too. Swedish rail company SJ is already using microchips as a form of identification for their transit passengers. 

Jowan Österlund is the founder of Biohax Intl., which carries out the implants for SJ. He looks at it as a way for companies to save both time and physical resources. “This is not just about moving a little bit faster in the line. In the long run, we need to think about how we can optimize our interactions with our digital environment,” he says.

Finger being scanned

Biometrics may be really taking off, but the technology isn’t new. Alastair Partington, founder and Co-CEO of biometrics and identity-technology company Tascent, says airports were the early adopters. More recently airlines have picked up the mantle. “Airports and airlines have begun to jointly innovate with offerings such as biometric bag-drop and biometric boarding, increasingly connecting the passenger journey by offering an integrated experience across multiple touchpoints,” Partington explains.

As with any major technological innovation, biometric technology has its own barriers to adoption, certainly on a widespread scale. Luckily, passengers being hesitant to accept this technology does not seem to be one of them. According to IATA’s 2017 Global Passenger Survey, 64 percent of respondents chose biometric identification as their preferred traveling token over paper documents or their mobile phones.