The Rise of Wearables for Health and Safety Applications

David Su, CEO, Atmosic Technologies

As businesses and venues have looked to re-open amidst the COVID-19 crisis, there has been a growing market demand for contact tracing devices and exposure notification systems. While smartphone manufacturers started to integrate contact tracing software and applications into their devices early on in the pandemic, the ongoing challenge of smartphone access, cost and connectivity remained. Some organizations and countries have turned to wearables for an efficient contact tracing system that is both low cost and easy to manage.

Wearables provide a solution for users to stay informed about potential exposure to the virus while addressing the cost and access challenges. Wearables also can track other types of valuable information, such as temperature. This is incredibly valuable for managed environments such as factories, warehouses, theme parks, entertainment venues, etc. If an individual’s temperature goes beyond a certain threshold, their company could suggest that they go to an onsite health clinic for further evaluation. Wearables can also be designed to withstand certain conditions, like high temperatures, and be tamper and tear resistant for continuous wear. Additionally, as global travel starts to increase, visitors entering a country could be required to be monitored in order to reduce exposure.

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Manny Marcano

With 2020 behind us, I think it’s safe to say that even the best-laid plans can change in an instant. 2020 changed our work environments and 2021 will continue to feel the effects of this. With engineers working in multiple environments, often transitioning between the office and working-from-home, reliable and consistent access to current data and content is going to be more important than ever. Companies who adapt to this new work structure and provide centralized content and a streamlined design process (eliminating sourcing from multiple locations) will usher in success by shortening time-to-market deadlines even with the most complex designs.

Varying work environments has also complicated the ability for engineers and teams to work together effectively, something that is vital with technology becoming smaller and denser. We will see the long-standing collaboration issues between electrical and mechanical addressed, and the two fields begin to tightly converge. With design processes being anything but linear, the ability for these two fields to collaborate effectively is becoming more and more essential to overall project success.

The need for companies to create digital twins are being accelerated with the growing complexity of designs and varying work environments. This makes it essential that digital information is part of a cohesive model and as much information as possible is provided to the various teams so they can collaborate efficiently.  This means focus on front-end implementation and correct-by-construction design methodology is now essential.

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Yoan Dupret

Last year, we talked about the fracturing of the old computing order and how no one can predict anymore the winning architectural or algorithmic solution for a given compute or communication problem – even within a two year event horizon. We used AI as a case in point – which turned out to be pretty accurate as we saw the emergence of companies with brand new architectures, and all very different, such as AnotherBrain, Blaize, Hailo or SiMA.ai, while some others already disappeared or pivoted their products.

We also talked about how sensors are becoming ubiquitous in our lives, the trend to customize merchant chips and the tendency toward highly heterogenous SoC architectures.

We concluded that this not only means more chips but also more changes in algorithms, architectures and interconnects which would lead to the increasing utilization of field reconfigurable device, such as the ones enabled by Menta embedded FPGA IP – in short ‘adaptive compute’ devices. This also turned out to be accurate.

What we did not predict though was the global sanity crisis of Covid-19. Despite this, several eFPGA IP providers announced design wins in 2020 and at Menta we did particularly well as we doubled our revenues – though we would have done much better without the virus.

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