We recently had the opportunity to sit down with the CTO and co-founder of Notion, Ryan Margoles to talk about the release of their Gen 3 sensors and how the IoT will impact homeowners in ways that go beyond just convenience. 

Tell us about the history of Notion. What was the impetus for starting the company and what were the immediate challenges?

The idea for Notion was literally sparked by a sounding alarm in the middle of the night. My wife and I had just adopted a puppy and our carbon monoxide alarm went off at 2am; it was a pretty jarring experience. We jumped out of bed and opened all the windows and exited the house. Fortunately, it was only the furnace fizzling out. The next day, I called my business partner and childhood friend, Brett, with the idea to make a Wi-Fi connected smoke/carbon monoxide alarm. We set out to learn more about the value proposition of a smart smoke alarm, and how we could make it valuable for customers. We learned quickly that people loved the use case, but were not used to buying smoke or CO2 alarms; they are usually already installed in the apartment or in the home you buy. The product evolved and coalesced into a concept of a single sensor that could do multiple things: listen for smoke/CO2 alarms, detect movement, doors and windows opening/closing, freezing temperature, and leak detection. The competition offered several single-function sensors: a door sensor, a temperature sensor or a leak sensor. In our opinion, this was a barrier to entry for people who aren’t as tech savvy. We knew we had found the right idea to pursue.

What is your background?

I have a mechanical engineering degree from the University of Colorado. My background is in product development, manufacturing and big data. I spent most of my early career with Titleist and Callaway developing smart golf clubs.

When you set out to do this, size and battery power were obvious considerations. What were some other known design challenges?

There were three challenges on the onset: 1.) Battery usage: Battery power and replacing batteries every three months is tough for a customer to get used to; it’s a hassle. Our Gen 1 kit had a coin-cell battery that was difficult to swap out. We learned over time that just two AAA alkaline batteries were important since they are readily available and easy to change out. 2.) Ingress protection: Devices that are placed outside, in really cold environments or used for water leaks need to limit the amount of water that gets into the devices. 3.) Simple user

experience: it was a challenge to design a simple user setup. One of the areas of opportunity was the pairing process. With most smart devices, you have to go through a pairing process. We identified that as a pain point for users so we developed our own protocol for pairing devices. Our goal is ease-of use. Every device is the same. It detects all five “senses” and device tasks are 100% configurable in the Notion smartphone app.

How did Silicon Labs become part of Notion?

First and foremost, the account management team at Silicon Labs is easy to work with. We were able to get the answers we needed to make important decisions and the team availed themselves to all-levels of the Notion organization, from executives to hardware engineers. Second, the Gecko platform allows us to configure specific protocols and free our team to focus on other things. Previously, the Notion team developed everything – from OTA update mechanisms to the security protocols. It was very labor intensive. Silicon Labs helped alleviate much of this burden. Third, the Silicon Labs team spent the time building rapport and working with us on a pricing model that worked for our start-up.

What’s been the market’s response to Notion?

Overwhelmingly positive. It’s the best multi-functional sensor on the market with its simple 15-minutes-or-less set up, increased range, and long battery life. Our channel strategy includes not only B2C, but also B2B; we are partnered with several of the top insurance companies in the U.S. Similar to car sensors that help lower your insurance premiums for good driving, we’ve pursued a similar path for home ownership. Now a homeowner or renter can augment their monthly premium by installing Notion. Additionally, we’re the first IoT company to have

a partnership with HomeAdvisor. So, if you have a water leak, we not only detect it, but we can connect you with an available plumber in your area within 30 seconds.

What do you see is the vision for the future of Notion, and the IoT in general?

We believe the services extension of IoT is changing what it means to have a smart home. Being a homeowner is hard and our mission is to help you take care of your home. We have a 10-year goal of making Notion a requirement to obtain property insurance -- that’s how powerful we think our product and data is. We partnered with one of our insurance partners, Hippo, to be the first fully-integrated smart insurance product on the market. Every customer who buys Hippo insurance receives a Notion starter kit for free. Once the customer sets up their

Notion system, they get an exclusive discount on their premium. We’re driving insurance to make a change while adding thoughtful services to the Notion brand to help homeowners take care of and secure their home.

Recently, we had the opportunity to speak with Alex Rogers, Professor of Computer Science at Oxford University. One of his recent projects exploring technology and zoology resulted in the creation of a small, low-power acoustic device built to record the songs of a potentially extinct cicada. The project began a little more than two years ago and has since morphed into a start-up called Open Acoustic Devices spinning out of the university.

The Open Acoustic device, known as the AudioMoth, is already in the hands of many ecologists and conservation organizations that are using it to track and study hard-to-detect wildlife and/or potential threats to wildlife, such as gun shots by illegal poachers or chain saws in protected forests. Previously, if ecologists or wildlife enthusiasts needed a highly sensitive audio recorder for field research, they had to pay nearly $1,000 per audio recorder. Or they could opt for an open-source recorder built from a low-cost single-board computer, which required large battery packs -- sometimes even car batteries!  The AudioMoth, on the other hand, is slightly larger than a smart phone (batteries included) and costs roughly $50.

Check out our conversation below about how a small university project scaled itself to commercialize a one-of-a-kind audio recorder for wildlife.

Tell me a little bit about yourself and how Open Acoustic Devices came about.

As a professor of computer science, my interest has been in deploying machine learning algorithms on devices constrained by computing power and battery power.

My interest in conservation technology stemmed from an event at the Zoology Dept. at Oxford, which was exploring new technology for biodiversity monitoring. The department was interested in using low-cost phones to change how people conduct environmental monitoring. With PhD student Davide Zilli, we set out to use smartphones to listen for a rare cicada insect in the U.K., which we still don’t know is extinct, hidden or just rare. The cicada sings at a very high frequency, at about 15 kilohertz, which most adults can’t hear, but smartphones can.

We didn’t find the cicada with the smartphones, but we started thinking about how we could design a small acoustic device to automatically detect the song of this insect. Two new PhD students, Andy Hill and Peter Prince, joined the project, and we ended up building a prototype device, and then made it available to others about a year ago.

We soon discovered a huge appetite for low-cost, open-source acoustic recorders. We are now working with ecologists who use our device to record bats, birds, insects and other wildlife.  Until now, professional ecologists typically had been surveying wildlife with commercial equipment.

The cost advantage of AudioMoth completely changes the science people can do. It means ecologists can do research that would have been cost-prohibitive before. Previously, if an ecologist had a small budget, they could maybe only deploy three or four recorders. Now they can potentially deploy 100 recorders, meaning different types of wildlife surveys can be conducted.

Who is your buying audience?

It’s a big mix – it’s a split equally between university researchers (ecologists) and conservation organizations. We’ve done some large bat survey deployments with the Zoological Society of London and the Bat Conservation Trust. But then there’s a whole pool of individuals and enthusiasts recording birds and bats on their own.

Can you tell me about the performance of the device?

From the beginning, we were looking to create a minimal device we could run smart algorithms on to only record when hearing a sound of interest. In the first instance, this was the New Forest cicada.

We combined an inexpensive MEMS microphone, similar to what’s inside a smartphone, with an SD card and MCU to create a programmable and highly mobile device. Because of the small size, the microphones are extremely sensitive to high frequencies -- perfect for people interested in bats, where they are recording at 100 kilohertz.

We have a lot of deployments in remote jungles and forests with extremely limited Internet access, but we are still planning to add low-power wireless connectivity to new versions of the device for alerting, streaming and research purposes.

Did you have any design challenges?

The key challenge for a battery-powered device is power -- we knew we had to focus on low power from the beginning. Our users worry most about how much data they will end up recording. We used Silicon Labs’ Wonder Gecko microcontrollers because of their low power capabilities, which results in smaller batteries and longer life in the field.

The non-commercial, open-source recorder alternative is typically based on Raspberry Pi, which uses a much more capable processor running a Linux operating system, and as a result requires a much larger battery pack. In many wildlife applications, the devices have to be carried to the deployment sites in backpacks, making the size and weight of the batteries critical.

Can you give me some idea of the power gains experienced by using the Gecko MCU?

To give an example, right now we have a deployment in Belize that involves listening for gunshots to detect illegal hunting in tropical forests. With a small battery pack (a 6V lantern battery), we can deploy a sensor that lasts for 12 months and listens continuously for 12 hours a day, only making recordings if it thinks it detected a gun shot. With the Gecko MCU, we can do nearly all the listening while the processor sleeps, then it can wake up to run the detection algorithms across a 4-second sound buffer.

How did the Gecko get on your radar?

We originally used an NXP processor and the Arm Mbed development platform in our prototype. We really liked the development platform, but the processor used too much power. Silicon Labs ended up being a better option because of the integrated tool chain, allowing us to directly measure and optimize energy consumption. We can also distribute the code, knowing that the development tools are free and are available on all operating systems, which is a critical benefit.

As a university project, how did you manufacture these devices?

To keep costs low, we started exploring alternative manufacturing routes. With Alasdair Davies of the Arribada Initiative (an organization promoting open, affordable conservation technology), we started running group purchasing campaigns through GroupGets, a low-cost assembly company that facilitates group purchasing. After testing the market with some relatively small orders, GroupGets enabled us to run off a batch of 1,500 devices from a PCB assembler, providing real economy of scale.

This model allows designers the ability to offer various types of devices, yet manufacture at a low risk. We’ve manufactured close to 4,000 devices so far and have a live campaign running at the moment that will likely result in another 1,500 orders. As a small university project, there is no way we would have been able to do without this model.

We also used CircuitHub, which enabled us to post our hardware design and bill of materials on its website. The concept essentially hacks low volume manufacturing. Suddenly, people can share and distribute hardware in the same way people have been able to share and distribute software.

Where do you see IoT going in the next 5-8 years?

Computation on devices is always more energy efficient than storing or transmitting data, meaning devices will continue to become smarter and handle more processing on their own. Many of the deep learning algorithms that researchers are exploring at the moment are still too complex to run on very low-power small devices, but there’s already a huge amount of interest in figuring out how to push these algorithms down to small, low-power devices.

Silicon Labs recently had the chance to talk with sleep-enthusiast Eli Lazar, co-founder of Snooz, a start-up company that created a white noise sleep machine that strives to turn people’s bedrooms into a sleep haven. A Kickstarter and angel-funded innovation that has only been on the market since April, Eli gave us a behind the scenes glimpse of how the product came about and how he and his partner successfully brought the Snooz machine to market.

How did you come up with the idea?

I used a fan to sleep in college and would pack a fan in my suitcase when I traveled to ensure I got a good night’s rest. When I was in college studying mechanical engineering, I started noticing that just about everybody I knew would sleep with a fan pointed at the wall, because they wanted the sound, without the cold air blowing on them. Later on, I also found a study from the University of Michigan that showed about half of their student population used sound to help them sleep. Fans are made to drive a lot of air and do it quietly, but we realized people were trying to use them in the opposite way and extract the noise from them and have no air. So we thought maybe we should make a special fan for sleeping. We found one other company that had made a white noise machine – a real fan, but it started in 1960 and the design hadn’t changed much since. I know there are apps and electronics on the market that mimicked the sound of moving air, but they weren’t real fans.

So how did you go about to make that happen?

The first thing we did was a lot of tinkering – experiential engineering. How do you make a “shh” sound?  I didn’t know. There are no books on that. So I literally ordered 10 CPU desktop computer fans. I ordered a box of CD spindles. We just started playing around with stuff. We ended up buying a cheap 3D printer and printed out a bunch of different designs. We eventually got to the point where people actually wanted to sleep with it, which took a full year of experimenting.

Then we started the painful process of fundraising. We did a Kickstarter campaign to test the market and raised a half million dollars in 49 days. We also attended angel pitch events and eventually got to an investor who had his own VC firm. He told us we were too small for the firm, but I gave him a fan prototype and his wife ended up loving it. He still told us we were still not well-suited for his firm, but he wrote us a personal check.

The next phase was production. Probably the hardest thing to figure out was the fabric, which seems like it would be the easiest thing. But there are only a niche group of people that understand fabric, and when you have a metal surface, it becomes an even smaller group.

Eventually we got to a place where we produced the first batch of 10,000 units and we shipped 7,000 on Kickstarter and the rest sold on Amazon or our website. We’re still very much trying to figure out how to bring costs down and those sorts of things. We don’t take a salary - we haven’t taken one penny since we started.

What was the most surprising thing that you have learned so far?

Everything moves slowly, it’s really true. Nobody is in a hurry except you. You go to an investor, and months will go by before you hear from them. Even now, we’ll produce something, and it’ll be 20 weeks before we see the product. It has taught me a lot about patience. But the most surprising thing is you kind of lay out how people are going to see the product, but then it’s totally different. For example, you might write out instructions for the device, but people will interpret what you say a lot differently. The other thing I learned is you have to have a thick skin. I mean, you put a lot of time into the product and you end up being very close to it, and people can be brutal. The vast majority of our reviews are very positive, but you do get some people that pick one little thing on the product they don’t like, such as the power cord, something little, and those things can really tear into you if you let it. I never thought I’d be as sensitive to customer feedback as I am.

Do you have any favorite stories from users?

We get quite a few emails from people that would really blow you away. People will say they’ve had bad nightmares their entire life, but since using Snooz, they sleep perfectly. We get a lot of people telling us they haven’t been able to sleep for long periods of time or they had to take medication to sleep and now they sleep fine.

Sleep is everything to people, if you can’t have it, you’re messed up.

Yes, and I think it’s an issue getting more attention. Last year at CES was the first time the conference included an entire section of devices devoted to sleep.

What were some of your design challenges with this product?

We had pretty tight constraints for what we wanted. We brought prototypes to the design firm and laid out our guidelines. They came up with 8 or 9 designs and we were really drawn to the fabric design because it allows sound to go through it unobstructed. We liked the idea of combining fabric and electronics.

Our original vision was the device would be a beautiful product that sits in your room and you don’t interact with it – you don’t even have to touch it. That’s why we decided to use the Bluetooth chip from Silicon Labs because it gave us the ability to program its schedule or turn on remotely.

The fabric was a real challenge. They make the fabric wraps automated, but there’s still some manual work to sew the seams. We did a lot to make sure the fabric isn’t toxic, as well.

Creating the right packaging was another challenge. One thing a design professional asked us right when we were starting was, “Why do people buy products?” And we said for functionality. And he said, “No, no, people don’t buy products for function – they buy them for the emotional connection.” So just having the right package feel, the look to the box – was important to us.

What product did you use from Silicon Labs?

Initially, we used the BLE113, but then we switched recently to the new BGM113. I was already familiar with Silicon Labs, but the decision stemmed from our connection with a design firm in Chicago. The firm highly recommended Silicon Labs products and they had a lot of experience with your company and said the technology always pretty much works – it’s really rock solid. They explained that you can always find other dirt cheap chips out there, but you’re going to have all kinds of issues.

Where do you see IoT going in the next 5-8 years?

We have definitely encountered two crowds that we sell to. One group loves the app, loves the Bluetooth and loves everything connected. But then the other group is like, I don’t want any of that – I want it old-school simple. We keep trying to figure out the right balance, where we make things connected but not so connected that they become a nuisance to people. My impression is it’s probably going to be a fight about what things should be connected and what shouldn’t be.

One of the things about Kickstarter is we had 6,000 backers – it’s like having 6,000 bosses. People were telling us to add this and add that, but we didn’t want it to be this super connected device. I don’t think the bedroom should have a ton of connected devices – it should be a place where it’s free of that. I hope IoT’s pace doesn’t go so fast that people try to connect everything, because then people will learn to hate it. But it can be useful if it goes at the right pace, because with some things it just makes sense.

I don’t like when things get too complicated. I’d rather the whole company flop and stick to the vision that we are going to do what’s right for people, not the company. Because I know if we start adding all kinds of new features, the product might sell more, but I don’t think people will sleep better because of it and it’ll cause them more frustration. My partner and I really just want to do what will help people sleep better. 

Silicon Labs recently had the opportunity to sit down with Andrea Perdomo to discuss the personal safety company she co-founded, Revolar. Perdomo, who immigrated to the U.S. from Colombia as a child, shares her personal inspiration behind the product and explains some of the design challenges she experienced launching a simple yet powerful IoT technology that alerts loved ones if the user is in danger.

Can you tell us a little bit about your company Revolar?

Revolar is a personal safety technology company. We created a small device that you clip onto your clothing, key chain, handbag, etc. The device is for those moments where you just need to connect with your loved one. The device is connected to your phone via Bluetooth. There are three different alert levels. The first is a “hey, I’m home or I’m safe” alert. Two clicks is a yellow alert, which is for when you are uncomfortable or just want someone to be with you virtually. And the third alert is for full blown emergencies. We launched our first product in 2015 and launched the new version in April of this year.

What prompted you to create the technology and the company?

My co-founder, Jackie Ros, and I were close friends before we started the company together. Jackie’s younger sister was the ultimate inspiration for Revolar. Her sister was assaulted twice by the age of 17. In both circumstances, her sister didn’t have time to reach for her phone and call for help. Jackie wanted to create a magic button that her sister could press that would let people know where she was and that she needed help. And that’s pretty much what we did. We realized nothing like this existed yet. There were products such as Life Alert and 24/7 trackers for your kids, but nothing in the middle. We had no technology background at all, but we figured out how to do it.

I’m originally from Colombia and I moved to the U.S. for safety and security reasons after my grandmother was kidnapped for eight months. She’s OK now, but if she would have had Revolar, we would have known her last whereabouts and known something was wrong. Then we could have started looking sooner. Instead, we went a whole month without knowing where she was.

What were the circumstances? Was she held for ransom?

Yes, ransom. It was back in the 90s – everybody was getting kidnapped left and right. And my Dad said, “This is it, we can’t live here anymore.” So I’ve been surrounded by the mentality of “stay safe” or “don’t talk to strangers.” Moving to the U.S., it’s definitely safer here. But at the same time, Revolar is for those moments where you just can’t predict it. We started Revolar in Denver – just the two of us – and we slowly grew our team. I went to business school and I’ve always said you don’t know how to start your own business until you do it. We eventually figured it out and found a team of advisors and investors who believed in what we were doing.

What kind of stories and feedback have you received from the users?

We have learned that our customer base is broad – we have male and female users from every age group above 13 years old. So customization of the experience is important. Not everybody is the same – a red alert for one person might be totally different for someone who has food allergies versus someone who is a runner. So we started enhancing our software.  Now users can customize messages and change contacts for each alert level. We also learned that people were using Revolar just on the weekends or when they thought something would happen. So in our new version we created ways people can use the device regularly and not just when they need it. For example, the new version will beep so you can find your keys or phone. We also activated step-tracking for active users who want to use Revolar to count steps.

That’s great you’re learning how people are really using it.

Interestingly enough, people are using it for reasons that I never thought of. I kid you not, I know people are using it to let friends know what bar they’re at. Or if they go on a hike, they use it to show people what hike they went on. Or they take check-ins while they are shopping to remember where they were.

Is there a way to aggregate the data about where people of certain ages congregate or use their devices most frequently?

When we talk to police or governing bodies of cities or universities, we always get that question. They say, “You’re telling me that we will know when people are feeling vulnerable or uncomfortable?” A perfect example is if we’re getting a bunch of yellow or red alerts from a certain fraternity at a college campus. We know a lot of this information is sensitive and personal to our customers and we want to respect everyone’s privacy. But at the same time, if we can get our users to let us know why they are using Revolar, we can help people in the future.

Can you tell us about the process of building the device?

Our proof of concept was built by an engineer we contracted with in Colorado. Within three months, we had a functioning prototype. It was jankie and we had to unplug it to set off the alert. We also had to convert our phones to Androids because that was the only way to build the app.  We later brought on an advisor who was both an electrical and a mechanical engineer. In two weeks, he built the prototype we ended up using in the first version of our product. We then found an industrial designer to contract for us and that part was fun – making sure the design was pretty. Once we started the manufacturing process, our contract manufacturer brought on the CTO and started putting all of the pieces together.

Was the design of the product a challenge since it hadn’t been done before? Or was it a process smooth?

Oh, no. It was really hard. I remember every engineer I talked to said “Oh, that’s easy, we can do that.” But then there was always something. One of the challenges was size. The battery life was another challenge. And the button, making sure the button was concave enough to remove the risk of false alerts. And features – there were so many features we wanted, but we couldn’t compromise the size or battery life. Initially, we thought it would be a great idea to have four buttons. Then we learned how much it would cost and how much it would drain the battery. Most of the Bluetooth chips that existed at the time powered cell phones or sent  messages with high-bandwidth, and we didn’t need all of that. We ended up going with Bluetooth Low Energy because everything else would have taken longer to make. It took us over a year to have the final product.

What specific Silicon Labs products are in the device?

The Wireless Blue Gecko SoC. The product helped us achieve a longer battery life and create our small form factor.

Where do you see IoT going in the next 5-8 years?

I think we’re going to start seeing  people consolidate IoT. Especially as we hear people say they don’t want to charge another thing – they want devices to do multiple things. Most people have no idea what IoT means – I’d say 80 percent of the world or more. I still run across people who don’t know what Bluetooth is – or what a wearable is. So although technology is moving fast, there is still a big gap in education. I also think we’ll see wearables and IoT in places that you would never imagine, such as clothing and handbags. I believe tech will become fashion. Probably not in the next 5-8 years, but in the next 20.

Intelligent transportation system provider Q-Free has been working in the transportation management market for the past 30 years. Based in Norway, the global company plans to roll out a new parking IoT product this fall. According to an INRIX study published in USA Today, American drivers spend 17 hours a year searching for parking spots and a whopping $20 billion annually in garage fees, parking tickets, and fuel burned while searching for a spot. Silicon Labs recently had the chance to sit down with Q-Free Project Manager, Brage Blekken, to hear more about the new sensor parking product.

So for people not familiar with Q-Free, can you give us a brief overview of the company?

Q-Free delivers a broad portfolio of intelligent transportation systems for the global market. Our systems include solutions for electronic road tolling (DSRC systems), vehicle counters and classifiers, traffic control and surveillance technologies, and parking management solutions. Our product installations can be found in more than 20 countries around the world.

How did the company get started?

Our company started in the eighties after building electronic toll collection technologies in Norway. Since then, we have greatly expanded our product offering to include numerous intelligent transportation technologies, with recent expansions into Europe, Asia, South America, and we are now entering North America. We’ve built some of the largest nationwide road tolling systems found in the world today.

Can you tell us a little bit about your parking sensor technology?

We actually used technology from our toll road technology products and applied it to our parking sensors. Over the past five years, we’ve been offering indoor parking technology, which are systems you find in indoor parking lots, such as shopping malls. These systems hang over the parking space to detect, track, and monitor parked cars.

Now what is the IoT parking technology you are planning to launch later this year? How does it work?

Our new ParQSense Smart Parking Sensor helps drivers find parking spots on the street level by using wireless technology. Most people don’t know this, but typically 20 percent of the traffic on the roads in an urban area is generated from people looking for parking spots. So our product is essentially removing excess traffic off the roads, which is Q-Free’s primary mission as a company – remove the Q’s (vehicle flow), or the excess traffic flow on the road.

Our Smart Sensor uses dual technology (radar and magnetic field) to sense with 99% accuracy whether a vehicle is present in a parking space. Space availability sensor data is then transmitted to centralized base stations using long range communication. The Q-Free HUB, the cloud IoT backend service can send that information to a variety of outputs, such as Variable Message Signs located near the parking site, and it can also go straight to end-users through websites or mobile phone applications. The ParQSense Smart Sensor product line will be commercially launched at the 25th ITS World Congress in Copenhagen September 17-21, 2018. For our next development, we are working on a full IoT Smart Sensor version which will use existing 4G telecommunication networks to transmit data directly to the Q-Free HUB. We’re planning to commercially launch a dual standard IoT Smart Sensor (LTE Cat M1 and NB-IoT) in the second half of 2019.

Is there a product like this on the market right now already?

The parking sensors currently out there today have accuracy limitations, so they are not producing correct occupancy data which can negatively impact the parking experience. Our dual sensing technology ParQSense Smart Sensor has the highest industry accuracy producing the most reliable parking data, which can be used to analyze trends and make future predations to improve overall traffic. We also have a rock solid dual communication interface, which is a real edge for us because it gives sensors the ability to communicate over long distances to our proprietary centralized base stations. The next development of a full IoT Smart Sensor in 2019, using existing telecommunication infrastructure, will be a huge step in the right direction towards realizing next generation Smarter City connectivity.

What kind of design challenges did you have when creating the product?

The combination of the high accuracy components with extreme low power consumption was our primary challenge when building this product. It also had to be rugged and robust to fit into any environment.

The sensor life expectancy is 10+ years on average. This means we cannot afford to use more than a few microamperes on average while maintaining the high performance data link and intensive signal processing required to operate the radar circuits.  

Different global IoT Standards have proven a challenge, that is why we postponed the full IoT Smart Sensor launch until 2019, to satisfy the LTE Cat M1 and NB-IoT markets with a dual standard Smart Sensor.

Can you tell us why you picked Silicon Labs as the supplier?

The main challenges for us in building this product were related to extreme low power consumption. Silicon Labs is one of the top players in the world for low power electronics, and also wireless communications components. That’s the main reason we selected Silicon Labs, you have the top solutions for our specific design challenges that help us design the right product for the market.

Where do you see IoT in the next 5-8 years?

Look at Internet access on cell phones – everyone has it now, though that was not the case 5 or 10 years ago. I think IoT will definitely go the same way as mobile phones - everything in our lives will all be connected to the Internet. And people will not be thinking about the technology behind it, they will just expect it to be there.

That means that we as solution providers need to converge towards standards for wireless IoT connectivity, which ensures easy interoperability between devices and online services. My bet is that the new low power IoT standards, NB-IoT and LTE Cat M1, which right now are being released into existing 4G and the upcoming 5G networks, will be one of the standardized ways to connect our devices to the Internet.

Silicon Labs had the opportunity to sit down recently with our customer Jerry Wilmink, CEO and Founder of WiseWear. With a Ph.D. in optical-sensing and biomedical engineering, Wilmink built a company that creates connected IoT devices that can predict, prevent and alert users in times of potential danger.

Can you tell me about where the idea for the WiseWear application came from?

In 2010, I lost my grandfather shortly after he fell in his home and never recovered from the fall. After the loss, I asked the CTO of the Air Force if I could get a bunch of smart people to come to my house in San Antonio and build a product that could predict and prevent this from happening in the future. We built a bio-sensing hearing aid that could detect and alert a senior when they were dehydrated or when their gate or balance was off. With this prototype in hand, I completed an executive MBA at the University of Texas and put together a business plan. After winning several competitions with the prototype, I decided to build a business. So I cleaned out my retirement account and started WiseWear in 2013.

We’re now making a whole family of connected safety and security devices that keep everyone in your family safe and secure.  We launched our first consumer product last year at CES where we actually fused advanced-antenna technology and sensors for safety and security into a jewelry offering. We’re now making a standalone connected device using low-power and a wide access network with extended battery life that does not require a cellular connection for children’s health & safety. 

So you were able to marry your personal interests with your background. Tell me about some of your design challenges. What were some of the hurdles you had to make? Especially around the design to create something that people want to wear.

We are primarily technologists with an eye for design, but we ended up partnering with Iris Apfel, former interior designer for the White House and a bunch of New York-based jewelry executives. We had them fly down to San Antonio in the initial product design meeting, given we didn’t know what jewelry should look like. They flew down and it was like the Devil Wears Prada visits the nerds. We sat at the table and fused together these two worlds of fashion and engineering. And we had a tug of war about what’s possible and what’s not possible in terms of form factors. The thing about connected technology design is the product is never done – you’re always updating firmware and apps. But in fashion, once the product is made, it’s done.

The challenges of this process were significant because this was the first kind of fused jewelry with sensors and electronics. Most wearables are made of plastics or elastomers or use a watch screen to transmit the signals through. Our patented technology allowed us to transmit the Bluetooth signals right through the metal material.

Was there any distortion or does that impact the signal at all?

Yes, but we have two patents to address this problem. For Bluetooth, we’re actually seeing the range from the bracelet to the phone is actually further than the phone to the bracelet, so the antenna works quite well, including distances of 50-70 feet. Manufacturing is a whole different challenge because we had to manufacture the jewelry piece with extensive orders for jewelry cuts. The cuts had to be precise enough that we could fuse the sensors and electronics into the jewelry piece while keeping quality and high fidelity signals.

I imagine size was an issue when getting the right components, such as sensors and chips?

Yes, we developed custom designs to get the right chips and components. We actually have one of the smallest boards inside any wearable. We couldn’t use anything that was off the shelf in terms of a complete board, so we had to design our custom builds with the antenna inside.

Tell me about how Silicon Labs got involved? What was it about our products that stood out over the competition?

You guys make the best components. Right now we’re using the Wonder Gecko 32-bit MCU and in some of our products going forward we’re going to be using even more of your components. We’ve always loved working with Silicon Labs and your components are just always the best that we come across in the industry. Given that we make a whole array and family of different types of products and services, Silicon Labs always seems to have some of the best in terms of quality and price.

Where do you see connectivity and IoT heading in the next 5 years?

Technology continues to gets closer to the body as we move from desktops, to laptops, to wearables, to smart apparel, to implantables - technology is invading us. The connectivity part is really the hot button item because the natural take on a wearable device is to just throw a CDMA or GSM chip in anything and connect it to the Internet. The reality is that’s like putting a gaming laptop on your wrist – it’s not a smart decision in terms of battery life or the utility of that connected product. So we’re starting to use low-power, wide access networks and make products that can connect at a very low cost.

Also, I’m pretty bullish on the development of smart apparel products for physiological monitoring and safety and security. I think that’s going to the next very important move before we get to implantables.

The technology design transitions we are seeing today can be likened to the transition of matter as it moves from a solid to a liquid to a gas. The initial smart phone and wearables were clunky looking, sort of like an ice cube. And now they’re starting to turn into a liquid and follow form factors that are more ascetically appealing and wearable. Then it turns into a gas and it’s ubiquitous, right?

We had a wonderful opportunity to speak with Brad Zdroik, Founder of Deep Freeze Fishing. A leader in the emerging IoT development occurring in the outdoor sports market, Deep Freeze Fishing helps fishermen and women avoid the cold while ice fishing by providing an alert system for their lines, freeing them to monitor catches from afar.

So for people not acquainted with Deep Freeze Fishing, tell us about yourself. What’s the elevator pitch explanation of what you do?
We manufacture and sell ice fishing equipment. We’re based in central Wisconsin, and we sell products throughout the northern third of the U.S. and up into Canada as well. We started off with an ice skimmer that clears slush out of your ice augur hole in one scoop, and that’s evolved into the current One Shot Skimmer Pro Edition. But our connected BlueTipz product is now our most popular offering.

How does BlueTipz work exactly? What’s going on under the hood?
BlueTipz is a tip-up alert for ice anglers. Instead of having to stare at your flag all the time waiting and waiting for the fish to bite, you can instead attach our BlueTipz transmitter on the flag. When the tip-up receives a strike and the flag goes up, a sensor in our device pings your phone, freeing you to be inside your fishing shack keeping warm for longer stretches of time until right when you need to actually take care of your line.

BlueTipz also allows you to be much more flexible during night fishing. Not only do we have a light on the tip-up that lights up, but you can also name individual tip-ups within the app so you know exactly which one has gotten a strike; it definitely saves you some stumbling around in the cold and dark. That’s a great benefit especially in the states that allow you have up to 10–15 lines going at once.

And what’s the story of how you arrived at a solution for ice fishing diehards? It’s definitely a unique niche. How did Deep Freeze Fishing even come about?
I actually went to school for electrical engineering and did my corporate cubicle stint and was just feeling restless. I moved back home to central Wisconsin kind of searching for what to do. I always loved the sport of ice fishing, and just fiddling around with my Dad, we created the One Shot Skimmer product that represents Deep Freeze’s beginning, though certainly not very techy of course.

Around the same time, smartphone apps were beginning to ramp up, and there were a couple other products beginning to hit the market that provided tip-up alerts. But my brother Ryan and I weren’t crazy about any of them and thought they could work much, much better. So we decided to build our own, and that is how BlueTipz was born.

How would you say your solution has evolved since 2012 when you started out, as well as your design challenges over time?
The core solution has actually remained the same since we started. It’s become more of a matter of putting more high-quality, sophisticated hardware pieces inside as technology has gotten better since we started out in 2012. That has let us extend battery life over time and continue to be able to keep working in temperatures as low as -20° to -30° F. Being able to withstand the brutal open cold is hands-down what’s always driving us. If a component can’t take the cold, we can’t use it.

We also have about a 600-foot range from BlueTipz to your phone, and that’s grown from our original capabilities. We’ve had to make sure the signal can make it through a typical fishing shack and the human body, so we’ve definitely invested in boosting the signal itself and always make sure the Bluetooth module can do its job.

What Silicon Labs’ product are you using in BlueTipz? And why did you select it?
We started out with the Bluegiga BLE112 and have actually transitioned over to the Bluegiga BLE121LR to get the extended signal range. It’s a good value and it can withstand the extreme cold. We couldn’t be happier with it.

What do see in the future for Deep Freeze Fishing?
Ice fishing is obviously a niche market within fishing; we hope to develop some applications for open-water fishing as that is obviously a substantially larger market. We feel the whole space is lacking in terms of IoT development.

In closing, we always ask our IoT Heroes one Bonus Question: Where do you see the collective IoT heading in the next 5–8 years in your opinion?
As I said, we think even just regular fishing is vastly lacking in connected development that could really be meaningful and helpful for end-users. The industry is just behind all the amazing things we see on the news. I think we are really going to witness a blossoming of applications across the board in the coming years for outdoor sports users, and that’s exciting.

In recent years, the growing wave of Internet of Things (IoT) applications has spread to many highly specialized market segments, including industrial automation, intelligent retail, intelligent logistics, and intelligent transportation, which are all blue ocean markets with high expectations. However, the solutions needed for these various segments have something in common: they all require a very stable and secure network architecture with multiple nodes and low power consumption.

To overcome this complex technical challenge, M2COMM, a leading provider of low power consumption IoT communication technologies, has developed its own proprietary protocol, called Platanus. Boasting a battery life of 5-10 years, Platanus provides a reliable network physical layer solution for intelligent retail and logistics systems by taking advantage of outstanding RF sensitivity and linearity technologies and ultra-low power consumption EZRadio PRO series Sub-GHz RF transceivers from Silicon Labs. This protocol is poised to greatly accelerate the commercialization of IoT technologies.

We were given an opportunity recently to interview Dr. Derrick Wei, CEO of M2COMM. We asked for his observations on specialized IoT applications and overall technological developments to help us see IoT business opportunities from another angle.

Please tell us about your experience and unique perspective regarding the IoT market and product design.

IoT is an application concept involving many fields, with high vertical integration and highly compatible software and hardware. People started discussing IoT as early as 2008, but the IoT market is still in its infancy. Compared to IoT applications in consumer electronics, such as wearable devices and B2C business models, I think it is easy to see the commercial value of specialized IoT market segments, including logistics, retail, industrial and B2B applications, and they are very likely to take off rapidly.

The key problem in IoT applications is the stability and reliability of the network physical layer, which is even more important for system integrators and service vendors in certain market segments. M2COMM, ever since its initial involvement in the IoT market, has targeted the intelligent retail and logistics segments, which have highly anticipated business opportunities. It has specialized in overcoming various network communication protocol challenges, and developed a proprietary protocol which is highly reliable, supports massive numbers of nodes, and features low power consumption.

What sets M2COMM’s company culture apart, what makes its strategies unique in IoT markets?

M2COMM was founded in 2012. We specialize in developing unique, multifunctional WLAN and LPWAN wireless communication protocols with low power consumption. Currently, we have offices in Taiwan and France to provide products and technical support for our customers. Our mission is to use our solid technical foundation to create a highway for IoT applications so as to bring togehter our partners into a brand-new IoT era.

Just as IoT is an application concept with high vertical integration and mutually compatible software and hardware, naturally, team work and close cooperation becomes the company culture of M2COMM. Within the company, software and hardware developers must synchronize their steps, and software and hardware engineers must work closely together. Outside the company, we are eager to vertically cooperate with the value chain, from network communication protocols to wireless communication modules, end-user solutions, and cloud services, to co-build the IoT ecosystem.

M2COMM has already implemented its proprietary hive-type low power consumption communication protocol (Platanus) in the Electronic Shelf Label (ESL) system, and has developed Uplynx, a highly integrated wireless communication SoC for the Sigfox standard, which has greatly shortened the design time for manufacturers and achieved unprecedented success in the specialized intelligent retail market segment.

Tell us about the features and advantages of IoT products marketed by M2COMM and their benefits to IoT applications.

M2COMM has focused on mid-distance IoT (IoT LAN) and low power WAN (LPWAN) wireless communication technologies that both work in Sub-GHz frequency bands with or without authentication, ideal for connecting intelligent devices to the Internet. The LPWAN technology allows communication distances of several meters to 10 km, and offers the stability of a telecom network. The power consumption of IoT LAN is less than one-third that of Bluetooth Low Energy protocol, so you could say they are designed specifically for IoT use cases.

Recently, the Uplynx wireless communication chip M2COMM designed for the Sigfox standard passed Sigfox certification in Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, and Asia, which is not only an important milestone for worldwide application of LPWAN communication chips, but also marks the beginning of the global adoption of a single IoT design.

Uplynx is a highly integrated wireless communication chip that is specifically designed for Sigfox and its ecosystem partners and vendors, fulfilling their requirements of low cost, low power consumption, and small size. Such requirements were consequently reflected in the reference designs for certification, in which Uplynx uses a quartz oscillator instead of TCXO to allow its output power to reach 22 dBM without any extra power amplifiers. What is more, the built-in powerful 32-bit micro-control unit (MCU), 128 KB flash and 24 KB RAM in this chip, with a size of only 7×7 mm, provide ample computation capacity and application flexibility for developers. In addition, system manufacturers can produce products for different regions by designing only one PCB board when using the certified Uplynx chip, which will greatly shorten the design time and reduce problems in product management.

Building on the above efforts and product lines, M2COMM has also developed ELSA, a wireless electronic shelf labeling system with the smallest size and lowest power consumption in the world, utilizing the EZRadio PRO series Sub-GHz RF transceivers from Silicon Labs. Not only can this product provide a battery life of over 50 years, but it also fulfills the requirements of networks with large numbers of nodes. We believe that it will be very popular in the retail and logistics segments for its small size makes it easy to install and maintain.

Using its hive-type communication protocol Platanus, M2COMM built the ELSA wireless electronic labeling system in 2014. It shows excellent performance in data transmission and ultra-low power consumption. The brand-new ELSA also performs better in terms of software and hardware compatibility, system stability, and multi-node management, thereby allowing corner retail shops to enjoy the convenience and efficiency of the Retail 4.0 era.

Among the new ELSA series of products, the ELSA integrated access point (iAP) is the world's smallest electronic labeling AP, with dimensions of 100 x 68 x 25 mm. The combination of a retail store’s intranet and an ELSA router (iRT) is all that is needed to manage all data transmissions effectively within 30,000 square meters, an area equal to six soccer fields, without needing to go through the store’s computer or other servers. The compact iAP provides an SD card slot on the side for backing up of the store's data, and a flexible magnet on the back for fast and easy installation.

Both iAP and iRT can operate in WiFi-only environments, and include backup batteries to maintain stable data transmission during power outages. However, the function of intelligent electronic labeling should not be limited to showing prices on demand or updating labels. ELSA also provides cloud applications to let business owners easily manage and monitor all their installed electronic labels, making retail business operation more immediate and efficient.

What Silicon Labs solutions are you using now? What specific functional advantages have they provided for your products?

We have adopted the EZRadioPRO series Si4460 and Si4464 RF transceivers from Silicon Labs. They operate in Sub-GHz bands of 119–1,050 MHz, performing excellently across many RF performance indicators, such as linearity and sensitivity.

Please share your views on the future of IoT and the future focus of M2COMM

We think the focus of IoT will be on business and industrial applications in the near future, such as intelligent logistics and intelligent retail and industrial automation. More and more B2B business models will surface in the IoT market. Today, the development of logistics in Mainland China is sophisticated. The next stage will be intelligent logistics applications for intelligent management and wireless ESL tracking, which will create another huge wave of business opportunities.

In terms of intelligent retail, ESL will play a key role in the Retail 4.0 revolution. ESL will not only allow store owners to update product prices instantly upon stock quantities and bidding status, but also significantly reduce human errors in updating prices. Store employees, therefore, can serve the customer more attentively to increase customer satisfaction.

For the convenience of more retail store owners, M2COMM’s ESL system can be integrated with all POS systems in the market. In addition, M2COMM's ESL system promises an over 5 years service life with just an ordinary button battery, and is a very sustainable and environment friendly solution. We are dedicated to providing the most excellent IoT solutions to our customers, enabling our clients and consumers to enjoy better retail environments and services.

In the next phase, we plan to expand the application of our proprietary wireless communication protocols, IoT SoC and modules, and wireless Electronic Shelf Label system into the new filed, the factory automation market.

In recent years, the growing wave of Internet of Things (IoT) applications has spread to many highly specialized market segments, including industrial automation, intelligent retail, intelligent logistics, and intelligent transportation, which are all blue ocean markets with high expectations. However, the solutions needed for these various segments have something in common: they all require a very stable and secure network architecture with multiple nodes and low power consumption.

To overcome this complex technical challenge, M2COMM, a leading provider of low power consumption IoT communication technologies, has developed its own proprietary protocol, called Platanus. Boasting a battery life of 5-10 years, Platanus provides a reliable network physical layer solution for intelligent retail and logistics systems by taking advantage of outstanding RF sensitivity and linearity technologies and ultra-low power consumption EZRadio PRO series Sub-GHz RF transceivers from Silicon Labs. This protocol is poised to greatly accelerate the commercialization of IoT technologies.

We were given an opportunity recently to interview Dr. Derrick Wei, CEO of M2COMM. We asked for his observations on specialized IoT applications and overall technological developments to help us see IoT business opportunities from another angle.

Please tell us about your experience and unique perspective regarding the IoT market and product design.

IoT is an application concept involving many fields, with high vertical integration and highly compatible software and hardware. People started discussing IoT as early as 2008, but the IoT market is still in its infancy. Compared to IoT applications in consumer electronics, such as wearable devices and B2C business models, I think it is easy to see the commercial value of specialized IoT market segments, including logistics, retail, industrial and B2B applications, and they are very likely to take off rapidly.

The key problem in IoT applications is the stability and reliability of the network physical layer, which is even more important for system integrators and service vendors in certain market segments. M2COMM, ever since its initial involvement in the IoT market, has targeted the intelligent retail and logistics segments, which have highly anticipated business opportunities. It has specialized in overcoming various network communication protocol challenges, and developed a proprietary protocol which is highly reliable, supports massive numbers of nodes, and features low power consumption.

What sets M2COMM’s company culture apart, what makes its strategies unique in IoT markets?

M2COMM was founded in 2012. We specialize in developing unique, multifunctional WLAN and LPWAN wireless communication protocols with low power consumption. Currently, we have offices in Taiwan and France to provide products and technical support for our customers. Our mission is to use our solid technical foundation to create a highway for IoT applications so as to bring togehter our partners into a brand-new IoT era.

Just as IoT is an application concept with high vertical integration and mutually compatible software and hardware, naturally, team work and close cooperation becomes the company culture of M2COMM. Within the company, software and hardware developers must synchronize their steps, and software and hardware engineers must work closely together. Outside the company, we are eager to vertically cooperate with the value chain, from network communication protocols to wireless communication modules, end-user solutions, and cloud services, to co-build the IoT ecosystem.

M2COMM has already implemented its proprietary hive-type low power consumption communication protocol (Platanus) in the Electronic Shelf Label (ESL) system, and has developed Uplynx, a highly integrated wireless communication SoC for the Sigfox standard, which has greatly shortened the design time for manufacturers and achieved unprecedented success in the specialized intelligent retail market segment.

Tell us about the features and advantages of IoT products marketed by M2COMM and their benefits to IoT applications.

M2COMM has focused on mid-distance IoT (IoT LAN) and low power WAN (LPWAN) wireless communication technologies that both work in Sub-GHz frequency bands with or without authentication, ideal for connecting intelligent devices to the Internet. The LPWAN technology allows communication distances of several meters to 10 km, and offers the stability of a telecom network. The power consumption of IoT LAN is less than one-third that of Bluetooth Low Energy protocol, so you could say they are designed specifically for IoT use cases.

Recently, the Uplynx wireless communication chip M2COMM designed for the Sigfox standard passed Sigfox certification in Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, and Asia, which is not only an important milestone for worldwide application of LPWAN communication chips, but also marks the beginning of the global adoption of a single IoT design.

Uplynx is a highly integrated wireless communication chip that is specifically designed for Sigfox and its ecosystem partners and vendors, fulfilling their requirements of low cost, low power consumption, and small size. Such requirements were consequently reflected in the reference designs for certification, in which Uplynx uses a quartz oscillator instead of TCXO to allow its output power to reach 22 dBM without any extra power amplifiers. What is more, the built-in powerful 32-bit micro-control unit (MCU), 128 KB flash and 24 KB RAM in this chip, with a size of only 7×7 mm, provide ample computation capacity and application flexibility for developers. In addition, system manufacturers can produce products for different regions by designing only one PCB board when using the certified Uplynx chip, which will greatly shorten the design time and reduce problems in product management.

Building on the above efforts and product lines, M2COMM has also developed ELSA, a wireless electronic shelf labeling system with the smallest size and lowest power consumption in the world, utilizing the EZRadio PRO series Sub-GHz RF transceivers from Silicon Labs. Not only can this product provide a battery life of over 50 years, but it also fulfills the requirements of networks with large numbers of nodes. We believe that it will be very popular in the retail and logistics segments for its small size makes it easy to install and maintain.

Using its hive-type communication protocol Platanus, M2COMM built the ELSA wireless electronic labeling system in 2014. It shows excellent performance in data transmission and ultra-low power consumption. The brand-new ELSA also performs better in terms of software and hardware compatibility, system stability, and multi-node management, thereby allowing corner retail shops to enjoy the convenience and efficiency of the Retail 4.0 era.

Among the new ELSA series of products, the ELSA integrated access point (iAP) is the world's smallest electronic labeling AP, with dimensions of 100 x 68 x 25 mm. The combination of a retail store’s intranet and an ELSA router (iRT) is all that is needed to manage all data transmissions effectively within 30,000 square meters, an area equal to six soccer fields, without needing to go through the store’s computer or other servers. The compact iAP provides an SD card slot on the side for backing up of the store's data, and a flexible magnet on the back for fast and easy installation.

Both iAP and iRT can operate in WiFi-only environments, and include backup batteries to maintain stable data transmission during power outages. However, the function of intelligent electronic labeling should not be limited to showing prices on demand or updating labels. ELSA also provides cloud applications to let business owners easily manage and monitor all their installed electronic labels, making retail business operation more immediate and efficient.

What Silicon Labs solutions are you using now? What specific functional advantages have they provided for your products?

We have adopted the EZRadioPRO series Si4460 and Si4464 RF transceivers from Silicon Labs. They operate in Sub-GHz bands of 119–1,050 MHz, performing excellently across many RF performance indicators, such as linearity and sensitivity.

Please share your views on the future of IoT and the future focus of M2COMM

We think the focus of IoT will be on business and industrial applications in the near future, such as intelligent logistics and intelligent retail and industrial automation. More and more B2B business models will surface in the IoT market. Today, the development of logistics in Mainland China is sophisticated. The next stage will be intelligent logistics applications for intelligent management and wireless ESL tracking, which will create another huge wave of business opportunities.

In terms of intelligent retail, ESL will play a key role in the Retail 4.0 revolution. ESL will not only allow store owners to update product prices instantly upon stock quantities and bidding status, but also significantly reduce human errors in updating prices. Store employees, therefore, can serve the customer more attentively to increase customer satisfaction.

For the convenience of more retail store owners, M2COMM’s ESL system can be integrated with all POS systems in the market. In addition, M2COMM's ESL system promises an over 5 years service life with just an ordinary button battery, and is a very sustainable and environment friendly solution. We are dedicated to providing the most excellent IoT solutions to our customers, enabling our clients and consumers to enjoy better retail environments and services.

In the next phase, we plan to expand the application of our proprietary wireless communication protocols, IoT SoC and modules, and wireless Electronic Shelf Label system into the new filed, the factory automation market.

We recently took the opportunity to chat with Greg Tracy, co-founder and CTO of Propeller Health. A player in the healthcare space from Wisconsin, Propeller Health has been focused on leveraging cutting-edge technology to help asthma and COPD patients in a never-before-seen way.

Tell us about your core offering
Propeller is the leading digital platform to help people better manage respiratory conditions through sensors, mobile interfaces, and other services. The main conditions being asthma and COPD. Ultimately, we’re helping reduce the cost of care while delivering better quality of life for patients because we’re helping them remember when to take their medications and learn what their triggers are. 

How did you arrive at helping people with these particular conditions? Healthcare is obviously a vast space, and we’d love to know how you landed where you did.
My cofounder and the CEO of the business today is David Van Sickle. David is an asthma epidemiologist; he’s been studying asthma his whole career. David was always puzzled by the lack of data he faced. And just organically during a medical fellowship at the University of Wisconsin, he started doing research on instrumenting inhaled medications and how that could become the method for data collection.

In 2010, David and I met through the third cofounder, Mark Gehring, and began exploring commercializing the work David started on campus. That was the birth of Propeller Health. That was the core: instrumenting inhaled medications to provide more insight back to patients so that they could understand the triggers that were causing some of their worst symptoms.

And by triggers, you mean helping patients identify maybe the times of day, or maybe even the locations or conditions where distress could be activated?
Exactly. What people should know is that there are very effective drugs on the market for treating both asthma and COPD. But what has been missing is more insight into the moments when people begin to be symptomatic. Our mission is to close the gap between those moments and effective treatment, to provide the insight the patient needs right when they need it.

We want to understand the environmental triggers, even specific locations that might be impacting your symptoms. The times of day, days of the week, that sort of thing. There’s some more outward-looking forecasting work as well. Taking into account all your prior history, our solution also monitors the forecast for air quality, pollen, and other weather conditions. Basically we want to give people a personalized forecast for the next week.

So tell us how does your solution work exactly. What’s going on under the hood?
Sure. It’s very straightforward. Users just attach our device directly to their inhaler after sign-up, and we take it from here. We describe ourselves as a “hardware-enabled software company.” Most of the real magic of the system are the analytics and insights that we can find and put together, based on your data and all of the complementary data that’s based on location, environmental factors, and other sensors.

But the secret sauce of all of that are the sensors themselves for several reasons. Mainly because if you can't collect that data passively, it’s really hard to get the analytics engine to work effectively. I think a lot of people peg us as a sensor company. We really consider ourselves a software company that is enabled by this really great, small, low-power piece of hardware that makes it easy for data collection.

Having the piece of electronics on the medication creates so many new opportunities. For example, when we instrument meds that users are supposed to take every day, we can use audible reminders on that device to help them remember when to take them. So we’ll push your personal schedule when you’re supposed to take your meds, so 9:00 a.m. and 9:00 p.m. And that schedule will persist on the sensor and give you a little chime when it's time to take your meds, if you haven't taken them already. Using accelerometers on the device, we can start to measure whether or not the medication is being used correctly, if it’s in the right orientation when the medication is dispensed. You can put microphones on it to listen for breath sounds and understand whether or not they have adequately inhaled the medication correctly. So what started out as this nice, clever data collection mechanism has evolved into a service that can provide feedback directly to the user in other ways.

How would you say your solution has evolved since 2010 when you started out?
Well, a big change is that we’ve tackled more in respiratory. We started off with only asthma, and in 2014 we expanded the platform to also include COPD. It’s a very different population to serve, since it’s a chronic condition that’s much harder to treat and the patient pool is typically the elderly.

Broadly speaking though, I would say our evolution mirrors most startups, where you start to understand the types of features that patients are interested in, and the types of insights that people are interested in, and you’re evolving constantly. Over time we’ve become a much more passive solution. We don’t expect patients to report in a lot or be bothered unnecessarily. We try to limit outreach to those moments when there’s something actionable or there’s an important new insight. We don’t want to constantly remind them they’re having to maintain a chronic condition. We want to help in a meaningful, nonintrusive way that simplifies their lives and improves their overall quality of life.

What design challenges have you faced during this evolution?
In addition to wanting to make the solution very passive for consumers, three other things come to mind. We wanted to make sure we had a long battery life. Early on, we were all happy because we got a 30-day charge, but then we saw people were not in the habit of charging things every 30 days. Low energy technology made that problem pretty much go away.

Secondly, early on we struggled with simple stuff like attachment. There are lots of different delivery devices, and how do you attach to all of them and make that simple? We've had a lot of innovation on the enclosure just with simple attachment systems. Lastly, pairing has always been difficult, especially in the iOS ecosystem. So we actually took a path of eliminating pairing from our sensors, and instead rely on a whitelisting technique inside of our apps.

Are you working directly with pharmaceutical companies?
We do. The respiratory pharma companies recognize Propeller Health as a complimentary digital solution working alongside the drugs, ultimately rendering them even more effective by helping optimize when people take them. I think they appreciate we’ve created an easy system that helps patients remember to take their general daily dose and then provides insights for when they’re using their reliever medications.

What Silicon Labs’ product are you using at Propeller? And why did you select it?
A big, ongoing design factor for us is overall cost of goods. That’s because we sell into a market that’s very price sensitive. Of course, you also want any part you use to do the job right.

We felt the Blue Gecko BGM121 Bluetooth Smart SiP module was the perfect marriage of good value and functionality. The beauty of it for us is that it encapsulated a microprocessor along with all of the BLE functionality. So we could drop a part, reducing the overall footprint. We also decided to use Silicon Labs again with another device coming out this fall as well. In that case, it’s letting us actually go from two boards down to one and really simplify design again.

Where do you see the collective IoT heading in the next 5–8 years in your opinion?
What comes to mind is actually what I’m hopeful for. I’m hopeful that the world takes advantage of IoT in a very passive way. And what I mean by that is, using it to automate more and just stay out in front of things, rather than giving all of us some new piece of technology or a new app to tinker with just because we can. So in a nutshell, helpful and unobtrusive. Not just more technology for technology’s sake.