Why the world will be wearing more technology in the future | Ep. 144
wearable Computing is not just about having a fancy Smartwatch as companies begin to deploy other types of devices that can track our health or provide us with a lot of information on this episode of today in Tech we're going to explore a bunch of the different ways that we'll be wearing more Tech in the [Music] future hi everybody Welcome to today in Tech I'm Keith Shaw joining me on the show today Samir Hadad he is the chief product and strategy officer for microedge welcome to the show Samir hey hello welcome and sorry that's okay don't worry about it don't worry about it I'm glad to have you on the show uh can you explain what micro Edge does just quickly just so that uh people can get a frame of reference for your your knowledge in the wearable space sure absolutely so uh so M crage we are a company that creates and that that provide a software platform to create smart objects and especially in the wable segment we have our own OS that's called Vare and that is used by manufacturer to build wearable objects so that's why we are very well into the the wable market and we know uh we in fact are in contact with many uh manufacturers that build all kind of smart uh wable objects okay and uh so last month the Mobile World Congress event was held and uh we saw a lot of uh prototypes and products uh around the idea of wearables it wasn't just focusing on the smart watch anymore it was uh Rings bracelets all sorts of different things so does this give an indication that you you know we feel like that the future of wearables is going to be moving beyond smart watches or not not even beyond smart watches but just inclusive of of a lot more devices yeah for sure there are many many types of wearable products so you of course the the the watch is the most uh I would say prominent one as you can see you know we know all of the about the the big guys like apple and and Google that do smart watches but weable is all over your body in fact so you can think about earbuds that kind of weables you have glasses now that are also kind smart glasses that are webl as well uh and then you can have rings so you can see the you saw the announcement at Mobile World Congress about the the the Galaxy ring from Samsung this is also coming uh and then you can have even like some smart pins or like the human one it's a very new new type of wable that you can see so yeah it's all over your your body anything that you can wear anything that has a some smartness into it you can consider consider that as a wable and and we see that like more not I would say an integration but more like really an exposion of types of variables getting more and more diverse and why why are we now seeing this explosion is it because the the uh the chips or anything in you know a lot of these chips are less expensive to produce it's easier it's the you know you can get them in the smaller they're more flexible what what are some of the reasons why you're seeing exactly in fact that's one of the the main reason is that now it's possible to have uh basically the power of a small computer in a very small uh Dimension very small form factor and also with a very long battery life so before you you you use your chip but you have like a big battery so you cannot do you cannot really wear it and now you have a very small chip that are very powerful and see very power efficient so you can do a very small form factor and and do something very nicely okay and one and one of the questions I wanted to ask about the difference between wearable Computing but then also smart clothing because it feels like wearable Computing would be defined as uh accessories that you put on your you know you put on your body so it's you know either a watch on your wrist a ring a bracelet like you said glasses um but whereas wearables would be more you know chips embedded into clothing um smart t-shirt sensors and then I guess you got to go down to the the feet I would would something that you're putting on like shoes or socks with well I guess socks would be clothing but would like a smart shoe would that that be considered a wearable or more smart clothing yeah it's maybe the the between in between yeah the way okay I think I would consider some wearable that exactly as you said more accessories that you can wear every day more or less uh while smart clothing is is usually something that you work you wear just for one specific purpose right because just the Practical uh thing is that with clothes you have to wash it so so you cannot really wear it every day so it's really more like we see smart closing typically for uh things like sport AET that want to monitor uh everything in their body so they have like some very tight clothing with some sensors and also the thing that we see is that smart clothing is really more about s sensing so it's REM sensors uh it's not really more much about interaction while the the the the other we you have interaction you have action you have some uh some kind of s of um uh effect uh basically interaction back and forth between between the the the person I think I think um when we talked before the show you you you gave a great analogy it was passive versus active so wearables like a watch you would be more active with because you'd be interacting with it back and forth whereas maybe clothing would just be more passive monitoring does does that make sense yeah yeah that makes sense exactly that's what I'm saying about sensing is really more passive you just you you just monitor what you what what your body is doing uh active yeah typically what the the Smartwatch is an example where you really interact with it you can change the look and feeli you can launch application and things like that and even from earbuds you have the same expect with the earbud you can even speak to it so it's like you have all the voice interaction SM cruising is really more about the sensing and and the passive passive yeah so you you mentioned you mentioned earbuds and and I I think that uh for the most part uh earbuds are just for usually listening to phone calls but I I I saw something that Apple might be working on um adding features to its OS that would allow its airbud uh airpods to be more like a hearing aid device so could we start seeing more and more features that that utilize or more devices that take advantage of um the ear versus kind of a watch or or something like that do you think that we're going to see explosion in that space yes definitely so it's already in fact you already have a diversity of of earbuds already so there are some companies that already produce some earbud that are provide some ear enhancment uh some kind of he enement hearing enement so uh because of course uh when you do hearing gates are very expensive especially in the US uh so we have what we call over the counter here earing Gates that are now available and Company like Bose for instance they have this nice earbud that also can do some ear earing G function so this is an aspect and then you have also the interaction because with Alexa and Siri and all these things you you have kind of a voice assistant function in the in the deer bird and then you can have select all kind of application that are sound uh base like uh you can sing about radio or I would say music or even assistant again of course with the J know you can have assistant that are very smart so I'm expecting to see this kind of thing coming with earbuds I'm wondering if do you think that we could ever get to a point where maybe the earbud acts as a standalone system rather than just as a pass or as a go between between a phone or or maybe even your watch it'd be nice to not have to have the phone but then you know have have an earbud that acts as a music player connectivity device phone but I guess that's that's dreaming too much cuz the battery life would probably be a big issue No in fact there are some technology now so that to to some extent in fact one one one of the the aspect of being able to have your a birds as an autonomous device it needs to connect to the network so um there are two ways you can do that you can do with cellular that's we don't have earbuds with cellular it's really to reques too much power but what we are starting to see is earbuds with a Wi-Fi connection and Wi-Fi connection means that you can be uned you don't need the mobile phone at least when you are in your home setting which can just right as long as you're with that 300 feet or exactly you Wi-Fi on your your and it's becomes so it access directly the everything in the cloud and that could be very interesting in term of the the type of application that you can get you can see yeah yeah uh so as we as we explore a lot of these these potential new companies that are out there or potential new devices do you think it's going to be largely I mean are there space for new companies in is there room for new companies in this space um or will companies like Apple and Samsung that have such a dominant market right now in the Smartwatch side is it just going to be them or do are are we going to start seeing more startups perhaps enter the space to try to get you know maybe the the Rings or The the earbuds or the heads or the shoes or whatever yeah no it's it's not only startups in fact even established companies uh what we see in fact you look at the Smartwatch Market uh it looks like apple is dominant and it looks like uh they have everything but no they have in fact the proportion of the market that is L than 50% in fact they have more less 30% of the market and then you have uh the Google watch uh where watch is like maybe 10% of the market so over like 60% of the market is type of SmartWatches and so there is a lots of uh I would say segmentation so a lots of uh companies that that provide specific uh smart watches that are really targeting a type of audience that is require something different for inance sport watches if you think of sport watches like people like gin or po they really focus on sport first your performance and the users want this experience of the sport experience they don't want I would say smartphone on your risk like what is the Apple watch more or less but they want something that is very specific tailor to their their I would say interest and and their experience right so I think we continue to see that uh company will start to bring some uh different uh product that are based on the that that that want to to serve a specific audience with a specific need um so sport fashion Maybe let's say W is for kids for instance or elderly which for elderly people and so on so you can see all these kind of fragmentation of the market and Company will will will serve all these a specific watch for an elderly podcast host like like me um that's how specific they're going to get so when when we're talking about uh you know these companies that are going to be making a lot of these things what are the the challenges that they're facing cuz and and what priority like what's the biggest challenge and then but there are you know if you had a bullet list there's a bunch of different challenges that they face like what would do you think would be the the biggest right now yeah so I think there is a in fact uh so the first challenge is basically the tradeoff between power weight and form factor so basically uh the power because it's a weable device it must be autonomous for and can be it can work for for a long time from from the battery uh battery life is very important it's always the top in fact concern for all customers uh in all surveys that you do that's really battery life is number one uh but of course the batter is very heavy uh if you look at the the watch in fact typically the the Google watch or the the the the Apple watch they are very thick because they need a big battery uh so it has an impact on the form factor it has an impact on the weight uh so this I think the the the major uh I would say challenge for for any company that wants to build a weel product is that how you balance this free this three dimension right so is it is it constantly moving up and down where you know maybe a a battery gets improved and you can make it smaller but then that means you can then put either heavier weight but if it gets too heavy you you know so is it constantly kind of Shifting between those requirements yes the the the battery itself in fact The Battery Technology despite what an musk says it's more or less stable it hases not evolve since like 10 years or 20 years so it's always the same density of energy that you get in in your battery so you cannot really reduce the cannot really reduce the battery by itself so what you reduce is power consumption so you have you can do some Smart Designs typically like for instance for smart watches you can do an H hybrid design or you have a big processor and small processor and the small processor can take care all the time when when you you don't uh interact with the watch but you want at least to see the the display right so so there are some smart ways that how you can you can reduce power and then this is also an impact on the form factor because of course if you can reduce power you can reduce the battery then you can have a very sliek uh watch uh and it's very for instance important for glasses so glasses right there have studies that have been made that people wants to the glass to weight no more than 50 gram so it between 40 and 50 gram right if if it's more than 50 gr it's not comfortable and that's what we're seeing with the Vision Pro and some of those VR headsets too is that if you know they feel too heavy you're not going to wear them for a long time and um even even if you know every now and then my glasses get get too too heavy for me and I have to take them off so I imagine with all if there was a lot of technology in there too uh the quality of the materials also is important too right cuz you you don't want to make something that's you know yeah you want to make it light but then all of a sudden if they fall off your head or if you drop it and then it crashes in front of you that's a bad thing right yeah of course of course it's like so with the every wearable tech in fact we're in the realm of fashion in fact it's because you don't want to to wear something that says I'm cheap yeah so so the quality the look and feel also the uh and ultimately also the you have the performance of your your your uh object so uh so you you can always in fact some some people so we work with manufacturer and some people that sometimes make a mistake saying okay I'm just getting a cheap product that is made in China with and I have all this feature list here so they say oh I have all these features you can see you can you go to Alibaba you can find like cheap wbl with all kind of features but all these features in fact are completely subpar in term of performance and typically your sport analytics will be very bad let's say your your steps will be counted badly your heart rate will not be good so the performance will be will be sub suboptimal and then the experience user experience at the end will not be good right I I want to get back to the fashion factor a little bit too again this is an area in a category where um Aesthetics are more important than in maybe other other technology areas um I don't care really what my my Wi-Fi router looks like cuz it's usually hidden or it's on you know it's in the in a corner it's not a fashion access especially that I'm since I'm not going to be wearing my Wi-Fi router um so it has to be good-looking I think when when the Google Glass came out there were a lot of techies that were like oh this is great this is great but there was you know normal people were not going to be seen wearing it cuz it looked like it was just this big monstrosity that you had so you have you know and I think Apple's seeing that as well like people think that they look like ski goggles and um there is there is a bit more of a fashion Focus that you have with wearables that you don't have with others right yeah yeah right in fact it's it's very important uh what we see every time when all people we we we talk to they it's very important for them to have this distinct this distinctive look um it's a it's a it's it's a statement when you you wear something it's really intimate to statement about yourself it's like your clothes your everything so for Consumer it's very important that uh uh yeah the the the the look and feel really correspond to what the they they think about themselves um so yeah and and and so related to that uh this is a in fact an area where any company can also differentiate themselves by creating something that is unique and that correspond to a very very specific type of audience right do do you think smart glasses are something that can uh go beyond just this augmented reality or virtual reality path that we're we're we're going down and maybe you could have smart glasses that do different features like just you know the ability for me to just go boom record video or you know record audio or even just listen to audio maybe through the the back part of the of the glasses um I mean there's a lot of other things I can think of but rather than just trying to create this gigantic expensive device that you know where I'm sitting in a movie theater I don't necessarily need to see that but you know for Content creation it'd be great to just go Boop and you know record stuff yeah that's so yeah exactly exactly in fact there are two categories in in smart glasses we have the the few full out arvr headset like like the one from uh from or the one from from Apple so yeah this this if you look at this these when you demonstration with these things most of the time people are sitting because it's very uh it's very intrusive in fact it get get all over your your eyes and it gives you all this information and so on so it's very disruptive you cannot really work with these things uh but we see also another category which are the real I would say the real varable because these are things like this big computer on your your eye isn't there more like computers but the weable is really the the the I would say the the only gra of smart glasses are the ones that are really look like glasses and that weight like glasses and you can wear every day so it's it's they are more like AR glasses more than VR glasses right right and they will and you can use them for audio for video capture or even to display some information I'm sure yeah I'm sure that there are some C there are some uh little tiny cameras you could put like right here in the you know in the bridge and I'd probably have to go to like a spy store or something like that there's probably already product you don't have to do that in fact it's already exists it's a rban you know the the rban uh is that the one that meta came out with exactly so ran already has version two of this glasses that have custom capture and audio and the audio is very good because it's very close to your ears so in fact they use the bone connection to uh to create audio so it's it's great it's a great audio and also they capture the camera but they're not yet AR glasses now they don't have the display okay and uh but we know a company it's one of our partner the the company the the brand name is eno go and they have glasses that have some display and that used mainly for sport uh people so so so people that are really into fitness and Sport they can they can have a real time feedback about what how how good they're doing in their activity uh so this exist already also this kind of very small small small very lightweight uh glasses to to do some uh interaction especially especially with Fitness I think that the the less you kind of have to carry around with you the better um and so it would be nice if since I'm already wearing my glasses when I when I you know uh walk on the treadmill it'd be nice to have something that so I'm not carrying this and this and the bottle of water and it's all that other stuff so I I want to go down the rabbit hole with you a little bit more on potential uh form factors that we might not have thought of yet or maybe you've seen them cuz you're in this space and you've seen probably some some interesting designs out there but I started thinking of like you know what about the nose have we have we taken advantage of I don't know a little tiny nose ring that that that has a sensor on it maybe or um I think we talked about smart earrings perhaps um you know you got necklaces there are other excess accessories in the Fashion World um that maybe we haven't starting to you know we haven't seen some cool applications for I think uh before the call we we were talking about gloves too like smart gloves W would be something that might be taking it you know may be in the wearable space um yeah so so yeah all these all these could be uh could come in fact you if you if you look very uh to spend time looking you find uh always a company that has start that done one of these project so I know at least a company that does a necklace necklace that is more for Fitness uh if you look at smart closing we talk about it in the beginning there are all kind of smart closing already existing there have companies that have started some do some Niche products they are still niche in fact they don't have they have not found yet a big audience uh but I could you think about it like these uh basically earrings or this I would say maybe a cap or a hat with some sensors and I can could sense maybe your like brain activity and saying okay you're you're in a you're basically thinking well or you're you're in a good mood or you're not in good mood and maybe give some some information like that so right um yeah these all are all open we don't see Mass adoption yet but uh for sure there will be companies that will try to to design this type of product uh one of the things that was at mobile War Congress I don't know if you saw this but it was a it was a smart bracelet that you put and it looked like it was just basically a phone on motola motola and I looked at that and going like that I would never wear on my wrist because it just looks too heavy and looks too big um but it's nice nice to see these types of prototypes because it it gets our imaginations going about potential other possibilities so um overall are you optimistic about uh the potential for wearable Computing or is it just going to be Niche products maybe in the health and fitness space uh or are we going to just gravitate towards the the the smart watch for the for the for the near future yeah no what I see in fact is uh basically uh uh I would say Okay um compan building user experiences so it's really about the user experience not really about the object itself you can think about like the the user experience typically what I'm mentioning about these glasses sport glasses that that work in conjunction with your watch fact and if you have a sport watches you have the glasses so you have the the watch to to measure do the measurement and you have the glasses to to display the measurement so and this is the wall uh user experience the whole the ultimate in fact Fitness experience and you can see in fact the integration of these three things maybe your shoes your glass your your your glass your your watch and they all contribute to giving the perfect experience in term of the sport sport efficient those that you are uh so I see I think that this this type of integration of various object into perfect user experience that's what I'm thinking is a is a good very very good direction for the or so it's a I I I I believe that there will be continue to be some innovation in the field and uh there will uh and they will work yeah this this would be disintegration of experience be part of the The Innovation but then one of the the the issues is is if we do see an explosion of these types of devices there's probably not a a common uh ecosystem or an operating system that can manage all of this it's it's probably going to be focused on one vendor will integrate everything on one side and then the second vendor and so there won't be I I I haven't seen anything yet have you seen anything where there's like a wearable operating system common open- source type thing from the software from the software side or no it's like when you do when when you guys work with software you have to work towards the specific device that is being operated on right yeah yeah so so on on nor side we try to to to provide this kind of integration with our own V so we try to provide integration because we can work on any type of of object in fact uh and at the end in it's uh it's for sure it will be a manufacturer manufacturer Focus so one manufacturer will have kind of his own range of objects but there are some sard that stting to to to um to um I would say happen like the for for glasses U there's a company called active look trying to to build like a I would say standard or definition for how you interact with smart glasses yeah um so you can have the same I I could I could foresee that maybe at one point these manufacturer will come together and say okay let's let's be at least some uh common exchange standard so you can you can integrate these object with with with each other and this is maybe they maybe those manufacturers could then because it's technically an Internet of Things type thing an iot so maybe they work with home uh home network and home kind of automation systems and I think there was that matter uh exactly that's a good that's a good par a good parallel because in the home we everybody said okay it's very fragmented there is no common ecosystem it will never happen and so on and right now in the smart home it's happening like people are now everybody supporting the matter uh which is a standard for let's say interconnection between objects so I think yeah once we have like the the body is instrumented with all kind of object uh I think it's Natural Evolution would be okay let's do build a standard so this kind of wall body Network can can can work together oh boy I I don't think I'd ever want to hear the term internet of bodies or the I think there was a concept like that in the the past internet I mean a lot long time ago there was something about where uh humans were going to become their own uh access points for um for networking and and there was this concept of the personal area network where yeah that's right person and then you could provide Wi-Fi for your friends because you know you would have this device that was on you um I don't think that that necessarily went anywhere and Bluetooth is still around I I think most everything is going to go still through the phone so I think we're kind of stuck with that for a while uh there is also concept that you could use a watch as a the main processor so that's uh one of the basically it's it's not secret but that's what meta is is targeting they want to basically propose uh I would say a system where the glasses interact with some other device that could be in your pocket or in your in your wrist and it's they kind of bypass the phone because they don't have phone they don't have exactly they belong the phone belongs to the other guys yeah I think I think Google and apple would probably be like nah you know we're good so uh Samir Samir had Hadad thank you so much from for talking with us today on the show about wearable Computing some exciting stuff happening in the future thanks thank you thank you very much Keith all right that's all the yep thank you uh that's all the time we have for today's episode don't forget to like the video subscribe to the channel and add any thoughts you have below join us every week for new episodes of today and Tech I'm Keith Shaw thanks for watching [Music]
2024-04-21 16:23
