Category Archives: Blog

For my fitness tracker, I have a Jawbone UP3, which bills itself as “the most advanced tracker you can buy.” I like it, but I’m still waiting for some of the more advanced functions that they promised to implement with it when they launched it back at the end of last year.

Anyway, I was looking at Jawbone’s blog, and they have a couple of recent posts on step-counting, which is one of the core features of pretty much all fitness trackers.

If you don’t give it much thought, step counting should be pretty simple. Foot up, foot down. One step. How difficult can that be to figure out? But we also know that fitness trackers sometimes come up with information on how many steps have been taken that are wildly inaccurate. And if you do give it some thought, it’s easy to understand why.

Not only do people come in a wide range of heights and weights, and have a wide range of strides, but, as Jeremiah Robison wrote in “Making Step Counting Smarter”:

“…people are surprisingly varied and unique in the way they move. Some walk in sneakers, others in high heels. Some people swing their arms when they walk, others look like they’re carrying 2 suitcases wherever they go. There are commuters who walk, drivers who stroll, parents with baby carriages, and folks who jump, skip, or pedal their bike.”  (Source: Jawbone blog)

Jawbone’s approach factors this in, and they’re constantly refining their product. They have a machine learning system, and they do testing on subjects that cover different heights and weights, and are doing their stepping under varied surfaces and conditions. They recently put a fix in to accommodate low-weight individuals, whose steps were being undercounted.

In a more technical post of the subject, Stuart Crawford gets into more detail on Jawbone’s machine learning-based step classifier:

“In order to train the step classifier we provide the learning algorithm with enormous numbers of ‘labeled examples’.  A single example is simply a short snippet of accelerometer data, with a label indicating whether that snippet corresponds to one, two, or three steps.  Features of the accelerometer stream are then defined to describe each snippet.” (Source: Jawbone blog)

The full post is definitely worth a look, especially for someone like me. Machine Learning used to be called Artificial Intelligence (AI). Apparently those words spooked too many people, so it’s no longer as widely used a term. I studied AI at UMASS for my Master’s degree. At the time I studied what are called neural networks, basically simulations of the neurons in your brain. Each simulated neuron has a set of coefficients that get updated as the machine learns, similar to how the real brain functions.

And similar to what Jawbone’s doing with the foot, one step at a time.

Over the summer, I took my kids out to a weekend breakfast at a local Panera. If you’ve never been to a Panera, they’ve always (in my experience) had a system where, after you placed your order, they handed you a buzzer that lit up, buzzed, and vibrated when your order was ready. You then went up to the counter and picked it up.

Last year, they began introducing table service. Rather than having to fetch your own order, they’re now rolling out technology that enables servers to bring your order to your table.

They’re deploying an LRS Table Tracker system that includes:

• The trackers that customers place on their table. These broadcast your location to the gateway.
• A gateway that connects the trackers to the overall Table Tracker system.
• A mobile app that employees use.
• Tags that are placed on each table.

Critical Link, while not part of the LRS solution, does have clients that use our SOMs to implement base/control stations that do similar things.

Anyway, my kids thought the Table Tracker was pretty cool, and I could use it to explain to them a bit about what mom’s company does.

And speaking of my kids, here they are, waiting for our table to get tracked.

The Panera we were in also had new order kiosks installed that will let you place your own order, rather than give it to an actual human. They weren’t yet active at the store we were at, but, honestly, I’m not sure how I feel about this. One of the things I like most about eating out is that I don’t have to do the work! Granted, it isn’t like Panera is asking me to prepare my own food (though honestly even if they were, I would still cherish the fact that I didn’t have to get the groceries…) But I’m still taking on more responsibility than I’d like. But I guess that’s exactly the point, as this article notes that a shocking one in seven orders are wrong in the food service business.

The bottom line is that we’ll probably be seeing a lot more of these automated system in “fast casual” restaurants like Panera. Seems, alas, like they’re more efficient that us humans.

A week or so back, I saw in the news that the U.S. Department of Defense is funding the FlexTech Alliance, a consortium of 162 academic institutions, researchers, and that will focus on “flexible hybrid electronics, which can be embedded with sensors and stretched, twisted and bent to fit aircraft or other platform where they will be used….’This is an emerging technology that takes advanced flexible materials for circuits, communications, sensors and power and combines them with thinned silicon chips to ultimately produce the next generation of electronic products,’ [Defense Secretary Ash] Carter said.” (Source: Reuters via Yahoo)

While we’re not part of FlexTech initiative, Critical Link does do work on defense applications, and we’re always interested in what’s happening in the world of sensors.

The new – and pretty revolutionary – approach to electronics and sensors packaging relies on emerging techniques for printing on “flexible, stretchable substrates” in the high-precision printing industry. The sensors that will be produced, using ultra-thin silicon components will be light weight, and bend and stretch. This makes them ideal for wearables, and the applications range from military gear worn by soldiers to medical devices to consumer products.

According to the Reuters article, “the technology also could ultimately be used to integrate sensors directly onto the surfaces of ships or warplanes, allowing real-time monitoring of their structural integrity.”

Anyway, it’s always exciting to learn about new and highly-useful new technologies.

Somewhere along the line, in some show or another on the industrial revolution, I heard it said that someone born in the generation before the steam engine was invented had more in common with someone who lived in Roman times that they did with their own children and grandchildren. At the pace at which technology is evolving, this may end up being true of my generation. Technologically speaking, we’ll have more in common with Civil War vets than we do with our own grandkids.

I recently heard that CVS will be phasing out its one-hour film processing. Walgreen’s is doing the same, if it hasn’t done so already. Let’s face it, most pictures these days are taken on a smartphone. The few and far between ones that get printed out are done on a home printer, or via a service like Snapfish.

This reminded me of a funny story my colleague Amber had told me.

Her daughter – about nine years old at the time – had come across a joke with a punchline about a dark room. She asked her mom what a dark room was. Amber explained that you needed a dark room (literally) to develop film, since light would ruin the pictures. That explanation didn’t help much, as the next question that Amber’s daughter had was “What’s film?”

Film and dark rooms are just a couple of the things that “the kids” won’t get.

Amber’s daughter spotted another one recently, when she asked her mom why the “Save” button for files looks the way it does. I hadn’t thought of it – it’s just the “Save” icon – but it’s a 3.5” floppy disk. Which really wasn’t so floppy. The “real” floppies were 5.25”. Whatever the size, when was the last time you saw one of those?

Another funny obsolescence story came from a friend whose niece wanted to know how folks used to text on an old rotary dial phone.

If you played a party game and went around naming things that are obsolete over just the last couple of decades, it would probably take a long time to exhaust the list.

But in thinking about obsolescence, it’s interesting that a lot of the underlying processing technology that contributes to so many products becoming obsolete doesn’t in itself become obsolete.

DSP, FPGA, ARM.

Certainly, the processing gets faster and more powerful, but the fundamentals stay pretty darned consistent.

Just something to mull over on a hot summer’s day.

A few weeks ago, there was a tragic story in the news about an EMT who was killed when the ambulance in which she was riding – on a call – was broadsided at an intersection. The story was all the sadder because the EMT was so young – she was just 22 – and was working her last shift before heading off to graduate school.

As of this writing, all the details aren’t in, but however it turns out, when emergency vehicles – fire trucks, police cars, ambulances – are on the move, the circumstances are often dangerous.

Many traffic signals are equipped with sensors that enable them to detect the flashing strobe lights on emergency vehicles. (By the way, in case you’re thinking of trying to game the system by playing around with your high beams, the sensors respond to lights that are flashing at a very high rate, and some traffic lights work only when there’s a specific pattern to the flashing. Overall, traffic signal pre-emption systems are pretty sophisticated, and, in any case, it would be illegal for unauthorized people to have one.)

Anyway, there’s now a new, smarter system that also keys off turn signals, and changes the lights ahead based on the turn direction, rather than just what’s directly in the path of the emergency vehicle. The system is tied into the turn signal so it now knows if the emergency vehicle is making a turn at a light, and, if so, which way it’s going. It then aligns the lights along the cross streets in the direction the vehicle’s heading in to clear the path. This gives any “civilian” cars and trucks that are there a chance to clear out, because they’ll have a green light. And when the emergency vehicle gets there, it will have a clear shot.

GTT’s Opticom is one system that handles the turn signals. There’s a pretty good, high level video of how their system, which combines GPS and Infrared technology, works here. (You may want to skip the intro about why it’s important, and get to the “how it works” stuff, which starts about three minutes in.)

If it makes things safer for emergency vehicles (and those along their way), and gets those emergency vehicles to those in need faster, I’m all for it.