accelerometer

Nobody Actually Expires in “Pedestrian Dead Reckoning”

Dead reckoning. Unless you’re a pilot, you probably haven’t heard the term in a while.  Refresher: It’s a navigational term, used to establish where you are, and where you’re going, using the last known (“deduced,” which is the “ded” of “dead reckoning”) information about your location.

Charles Lindbergh dead reckoned his way over the Atlantic to Paris, in 1927, using its basic formula  — distance equals speed, multiplied by time.

And now, it gains a new, kind of odd, prefix: Pedestrian dead reckoning. It’s a way of using Wi-Fi and the sensor-enabled stuff in our gadgets to find other stuff, indoors — like how your Garmin used to navigate you to physical addresses, outdoors. (Before your phone’s map app did.)

In short, pedestrian dead reckoning — abbreviated “PDR” — is a little bit GPS (global positioning system), a little bit Wi-Fi, a little bit accelerometer, and a little bit magnetometer. (No country. No rock-n-roll.)

Refresher: GPS works over satellite, with predictable results once you drive into the parking garage. Wi-Fi is Wi-Fi. Accelerometers measure, well, acceleration. They’re what’s inside your FitBit, Fuelband, or other digital pedometer. Magnetometers inform your phone’s compass app.

Put it all together, with an app on top, and suddenly Costco could offer a “mobile butler,” that senses when you’ve entered the store, and when you’ve stayed still for a time. It could ask: Can I help you find something? Paper towels? Follow me — I’ll show you the way. Then your sensor-equipped gadget (meaning your phone) and app shows you the way.

That’s but one example in what has to be dozens of use cases that blend Wi-Fi, pedometer and compass. Pedestrian Dead Reckoning: It’s coming, and it’ll either save us time, or drive us nuts. Maybe both!

This column originally appeared in the Platforms section of Multichannel News.

 

 

 

What’s In Your Wearable?

By now you’re either wearing something that monitors your activities, or you’ve witnessed such gadgetry on someone’s wrist, shoelace, or belt. We’re now about five years into the rise of wearable technologies.

By the numbers (fresh from the NPD Group), Fitbit owns a 68% share of market, with Jawbone at 19% and Nike at 10%. Last year, consumers spent $330 million on smartphone-enabled activity trackers. That’s expected to double again this year.

Which means it’s time to take a brief walk through the jargon jumble describing what’s inside the gadgetry of trackers — because it’s thick.

Take the “Kiwi Move,” for instance. Introduced at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, it’s a piece of plastic, about the size of a book of matches. Inside it:  A gyroscope, magnetometer, barometer, accelerometer, thermometer, and microphone.

The microphone is easy enough to fathom. In the Kiwi demo, a woman says aloud the type and amount of ingredients she’s putting into a blender: One apple. One Kiwi (of course.) An avocado. And so on. The microphone hears the data, and calculates the nutritional value of the smoothie.

Likewise for the thermometer, which can work in tandem with the on-board barometer to predict the weather. Barometers, which became mainstream in the mid-1600s, measure atmospheric pressure. (Happily, the barometers found in digital devices don’t use mercury, which is still poisonous.)

The magnetometer came to life in the early 1800s as a way to find things, using magnetic fields: Submarines, coal, auroras, minerals. In digital gadgetry, magnetometers use a three-axis orientation (vertical, lateral, longitudinal) to detect motion. A compass app is a good example.

Accelerometers are the reason we can turn our gadgets sideways for different orientations (landscape v portrait) of images. And, acceleration being acceleration, they power the pedometer part of wearable technologies.

A companion acronym to all of this is “MEMS,” which stands for Micro Electro-Mechanical Systems.” It categorizes the work of very small things — 20 micrometers to a millimeter in size. (Last week, news from the MEMS world revealed that most smartphones now contain more than 12 MEMS chips, which will go to 20 “soon.” The report went on to stress the importance of the adhesives used to package the chips — with impressively nerdy names like “glob tops,” “cap bonding,” and “ASIC die attach.”)

Last but not least: The gyroscope, which also falls into the MEMS category. It measures orientation, based on the principles of angular momentum. In essence, it’s a self-spinning top, just like the toy. In the mid-1700s, gyroscopes were put to use as levels, to locate the horizon in foggy conditions. Nintendo’s Wii, and all of the devices powered by companies like Hillcrest Technologies, put gyroscopes to work as high-end pointing devices.

That’s a quick walk through the thick jargon of what’s inside the stuff on our wrists and waistbands, to inform us about how active we are, or aren’t.

This column originally appeared in the Platforms section of Multichannel News.