The Digital Edge

My Bluetooth World day one started with a great conversation over breakfast as I presented on the need and opportunity for innovation in healthcare using Bluetooth enabled solutions. Our group opened up and had some fantastic discussion around some of the barriers that are currently challenging this industry such as limited numbers of Bluetooth radios being integrated into medical device solutions for connectivity. We progressed to discussion on all of the possible use cases as well as the opportunity for the data from an IoT-enabled world of healthcare to create new use cases as we better understand interactions between machines and humans.

The keynote speeches and individual presentations had great information, I was most interested in the direction of Bluetooth and the features that are coming shortly, especially the improvements to the meshing capabilities and range as these will open the door for great new use cases.

Also of personal interest was Kiyo Kubo’s talk about Bluetooth LE at Levi’s Stadium and the pain of getting to where it is today. Kiyo had gone through all of the challenges around Apple reducing their probing rates to almost nil and randomization of MAC addresses in the probing frames, forcing a change over to Bluetooth. They then had to develop a number of tools to make it a success both from an initial deployment and long term manageability.

The Expo floor had a wide variety of use cases from BLE managed LED lighting that synced with car audio to IoT-enabled hearing aids that would use location and ambient sound to automatically adjust their sound levels and noise filtration via a cloud interface.

The WLAN Pros Conference is truly a unique experience that I look forward to all year long. Throughout the year we are inundated with vendor marketing material and embroiled in competition. WLPC is a few days where we can come together as individuals, educate each other, build the community and challenge each other to be better at our craft. This year’s conference will be in sunny Phoenix, AZ. Read more about it here. If you’ve never been before and you have an interest in Wi-Fi I urge you to make plans to attend. It is a great opportunity to network and learn from others in the field.

This environment provides a great opportunity to get up and speak about something you are passionate about. The mix of longer presentations and ten talks allow for a lot of variety and depth of topics. This year I’ve selected a topic on Healthcare wireless as my main presentation topic and then will use a Ten Talk slot to provide a sneak peak into my Bluetooth World presentation that I will be giving in March at Levi’s Stadium.