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219 is an interdisciplinary engineering firm with a passion for turning ideas into reality. We stay at the forefront of innovation, exploring both cutting-edge concepts and proven technologies ready to be used in new and exciting ways. We are seeing some fascinating technological developments that hold immense potential for near-term product development applications. Here, you’ll find insights into some of these technologies and how they could transform products across various industries – consumer, medical, industrial, and more!
BT 5.2 LE with the Public Broadcast Profile (PBP) has the ability to broadcast audio to an infinite number of receivers. This could be used in a private context where someone shares their audio with a group of friends during a flight for instance, or a public context where announcements are fed into a hearing aid. One unique case is the ability for multiple simultaneous broadcasts enabling a speech to be heard by an audience that does not share a common language via live translation, like the United Nations. This feature was previously trademarked as Bluetooth Audio Sharing but it is now called Auracast™ broadcast to emphasize the public use cases.
Looking ahead: Bluetooth’s Angle of Arrival (AoA)/Angle of Departure (AoD) capabilities could be leveraged to detect the direction one is looking and subscribe to a different audio feed automatically, if you are in a museum, retail location, or zoo.
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Image from Auracast
Announced at CES 2023 (but making more press at CES 2024), the new wireless power standard is available in several products. The changes from Qi1 to Qi2 include the addition of locating magnetics similar to Apple’s magsafe, enabling more efficient power transfer. The peak power level remains 15W delivered to the device, but higher power levels are allegedly coming, as is a standard for kitchen devices (2200W) and a standard for light electric vehicles. Beyond phones, this standard could be used to allow sealed devices to easily ‘dock’ and share power. Too bad I love traveling with several USB charge cables!
Looking ahead: We worked with Keyssa (now Molex) who has a 5 GBps non-contact, near field data interface. With near field power and near field data, devices could improve modularity and resilience.
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Image from Wireless Power Consortium’s (WPC)
Wearables, especially Smart rings/watches, impressively pack a ton of tech (radio(s), motion sensor, battery, body temperature and PPG) into a tiny package. With the use of AI it is hoped that current metrics will become more accurate and new diagnostic capabilities will be added. I am particularly interested in wearables for dogs who already have a collar and are sometimes less than forthcoming about physical ailments. The Minitailz Smart Dog Collar has the ability to measure heart rate and detect atrial fibrillation (AF), but it probably is not using PPG due to the fur/hair problem. Perhaps using accelerometer data instead…
Looking ahead: Wouldn’t it be nice if the dog bowl or dog bed could double as an inductive charger? Further, why not add a microphone and allow the use of Bark GPT to translate barks – though 90% of the time my dog and I have a perfect mutual theory of mind.
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Image from Invoxia
These are just a few of the emerging technologies we have our eyes on. If you are interested in exploring how new technologies can improve your product, reach out to us at getstarted@219design.com.
Date published: 03/22/2024