For many technology and consumer product companies, the Consumer Electronics Show (CES®) marks the beginning of each new year. As the most influential consumer tech event in the world, CES brings over 100,000 attendees to showcase the latest products and gadgets likely to make waves in the year ahead.
Like many other large industry events, CES has borne the impact of the pandemic, but the Origin team saw a great turnout from key customers in the health, security, and internet of things (IoT) markets at the show. While we expected to see Digital Health technology thoroughly represented on the show floor this year, there was an even greater emphasis on innovation in this category than in recent years. It’s no surprise this is an area that many have been watching closely for some time, as the pandemic’s influence alone necessitated rapid innovation, this year there was real action behind building technology to make a difference, particularly in the aging in place category.
Driving Digital Innovation
Another cause for surprise was the observed trend of age-old industries making a shift and looking to adopt more innovation into their product portfolios. For security companies, specifically, our one-on-one conversations indicated they’re exploring the idea of introducing new technologies into their existing platforms. For users, this means getting access to previously inaccessible context, like household activity, to further enhance and personalize their experiences with their home security providers and reduce false alarms.
CES is always a reminder of innovation in consumer technology. We find ourselves at a particularly exciting time for consumer tech, as users continue to push for greater interoperability between the devices and applications that help them best live their lives. To Origin, this points to a growing overlap across smart home, home automation, and home security, with providers delivering added value to their customers and enabling true customization of the intelligent home of the future.
Enhancing Lives with WiFi Sensing
AgeTech innovators and solution providers alike must be focused on the shared goal of ensuring vulnerable loved ones are able to safely maintain their independence and age in place with dignity, all without sacrificing privacy. Many solutions for aging in place in the past have been inherently intrusive or required an end user to rely on a wearable device – a category historically rife with adherence issues among the senior population. To truly create solutions that are not only effective but also practical, product innovators must continue to listen to the unique needs and pain points of caregivers and their loved ones.
CES 2023 was a great opportunity for assessment of WiFi Sensing and its proliferation in the near future. We’re excited that as the pioneers of this technology, we’re only just beginning to see what WiFi Sensing can do and how it will impact lives around the world. While the insights and analytics this technology is capable of delivering provide more value than has been previously possible for solutions in the security and health industries, these insights are nothing without context. Now more than ever, we’re focused on not only delivering actionable insights, but ensuring the insights are founded in the context of each individual user, their habits, and routines.
Advancing Our Health and Security Solutions
At this year’s event, we gave customers a first-ever look at our Home Monitoring 3.0 technology and our gait analysis application, both of which are fueling advanced applications for the security and health industries. Our Home Monitoring 3.0 application has the ability to distinguish between humans, pets, and even mechanical motion. This ability to differentiate is powerful progress for the security industry, as today only indoor cameras can provide this level of detail. With this application, security companies can identify the types of motion occurring in a home and route unusual activity information to the user or to professional monitoring call centers to categorize it as a “verified alarm,” helping to ensure this type of alarm trigger receives faster emergency response times as appropriate. By combining information generated by Home Monitoring 3.0 with our gait analysis engine, we’re able to create a powerful use case in health monitoring. The engine uses machine learning to understand how a person’s gait has changed over time, as stride time variability is a predictor of falls, and in working with partners like Aloe Care Health, these insights can trigger alerts for caregivers to check on their loved ones, and potentially help avoid serious injury.
We’re so grateful to our partners like nami and Aloe Care Health, with whom we had the opportunity to host these demos and together forge new relationships at this year’s show. We were lucky to meet many new people during the event, while exploring the exciting innovations on display. If the show was any indicator, 2023 has a lot in store for consumer technology, and we’re proud to be part of the innovation driving the progression of solutions in the security and health industries.