The Evolution of Bluetooth: From Entertainment To Smart Buildings

For most of us urbane mobile users, Bluetooth is a reminder of the “good old days” of the Internet through which we would exchange MP3 files and pictures. Today, it is commonly used in fitness bands, cars and even headsets. But the utility of this piece of technology goes much further.

Experts are reckoning the application of Bluetooth in smart buildings.Although the adoption is not largescale just yet, it is on the rise.

At the recently held Coe-IoT India Expo in New Delhi, there was a session held on the rising significance of Bluetooth mesh as a basis for connectivity in smart buildings. This is a networking structure that uses low-energy networking technology to interact and exchange information. A mesh network is where every single node is connected, allowing the effortless relay of data. While its largely used in industrial automation, it is becoming a reliable alternative for smart buildings as well.

More specifically, the current successes are being seen using lighting as the foundation for Bluetooth connectivity.

Let’s see how this works with LED lights, which are a common feature in homes and offices today. LED lights are an energy efficient alternative, but with the proliferation of IoT, lights are now embedded with iot india sensors as well. Buildings today are coming equipped with Ethernet cabling, which makes it way easier to connect sensor-embedded LED lights. With an interconnected lighting system using SIG-qualified Bluetooth mesh, these LED lights can be easily lit up without having to reorient a building’s wiring. Since mesh networking involves several nodes, each one acts like a gateway for the original net connection, constantly communicating with one another and amplifying the signal. Unlike range extenders that will likely slow down Internet speeds, mesh networks amplify speed and ensure the entire building is powering on at optimal speeds at all times.

The benefits of this efficient system of mesh networking are many. Bluetooth mesh networks can provide a wide range of coverage, interoperability, device monitoring &control, low energy consumption and most importantly, compatibility with mobiles, tablets, PCs and laptops.

For instance, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam recently replaced their halogen lighting systems with Bluetooth-enabled LED modules. Now, the museum’s lighting is controlled by Bluetooth switches. In addition, the museum also added Xicato sensors which use Bluetooth technology to broadcast data including occupancy, lux levels, temperature and humidity levels – parameters whose management is critical to retain the quality of the priceless works of art.

US-based retailer Target, during the revamp of its stores, is installing Bluetooth beacons in its new LED light fixtures to enable location and navigation. Once completed, this will be one of the largest deployments for a lighting-based indoor positioning system.

Scalability of Bluetooth Mesh

India iot Tech Expo in Amsterdam, Bluetooth SIG Technical Program Manager Martin Woolley spoke about the introduction of Bluetooth Mesh in 2017 and how it is a wise choice for smart building deployments. As of 2018, there were 10 million Bluetooth devices being shipped everyday and 34,000 companies support the use of the technology. A Bluetooth Mesh can support up to 32,767 nodes per network, sending hundreds of multicast messages per second. This range of scale can be achieved through multiple techniques including multi-hop messaging – where messages can “hop” across the network to the furthermost edges. According to Woolley, these devices can communicate with one another even when out of radio range.

Security Concerns

With the exponential proliferation of Coe-IoT comes the concerns regarding security. Reports of malware attacks and cybersecurity lapses in businesses make headlines every day. The industry is cognizant of these concerns, and Bluetooth Mesh offers a reliable solution. Bluetooth products essentially must support same security features, and a single compromised device cannot debilitate an entire network. Moreover, only members of the same network can communicate, mitigating the chances of a rogue device to connect.

So far, the lighting industry has seen the success of applying Bluetooth Mesh to lights. According to ABI Research, annual commercial smart lighting equipment shipments are expected to increase fivefold by 2022. 40% of all connected end points will be smart lighting based by 2021. Already, industries like retail, healthcare and travel are testing this technology in pockets, and furthering the use of Bluetooth Mesh for smart buildings.

With security, safety, connectivity and reliability being paramount to the success of a technology like Bluetooth Mesh, industry experts are optimistic that it will play a transformative role in the smart buildings industry in the near future.

Tackling The Cancer Epidemic Using AI

In recent times, breast cancer has become the most common type of cancer affecting women worldwide accounting for 25% of all cancer cases and affected 3.5 million people in 2017-18. Early diagnosis in these cases significantly increases the chances of survival. The key challenge in cancer detection is how to classify tumours into malignant or benign. Research indicates that most experienced physicians can diagnose cancer with 79% accuracy while using artificial intelligence based diagnosis, it is possible to achieve 91% accuracy.

NASSCOM CoE-IoT & AI & Eqounix Tech Lab organised a hands-on session on 28th September 2019, 10am onwards at the iot bangalore center on Breast Cancer detection. This was a paid session and there were over 50 attendees, consisting of basic & advanced developers from enterprises like Sopra Steria, United Health Group, TCS, HCL, Inventum Technologies, Publicis Sapient, Globallogic etc and startups like Attentive AI, Empass, Anasakta Labs, NEbulARC, SirionLabs & Vision Networks. Students from ICGEB/JMI, Indira Gandhi Delhi Technical University etc also participated in the session.

The session first half focussed on Wisconsin Diagnostic Cancer (WDBC) & Invasive Ductal Carcinoma (IDC) datasets insights, Visualization of Dataset, feature selection and why they are chosen and how the physical parameters are translated into a dataset. In the second part, the focus was on Feature Selection and CNN, random forest based classification of cancer as malignant or benign followed by the optimised the deployment strategy & cost estimation

WISCONSIN DIAGNOSTIC BREAST CANCER (WDBC):

The samples consist of visually assessed nuclear features of Fine Needle Aspirates (FNAs) taken from patients. Attributes 3 to 11 were used to form a 9-dimensional vector which was used to obtain a neural network to discriminate between benign and malignant samples. Cross-validation was used to project the accuracy of the diagnostic algorithm.

INVASIVE DUCTAL CARCINOMA (IDC)

Invasive Ductal Carcinoma dataset originally consisted of 162 slide images, scanned at 40x. From that, 277,524 patches of 50×50 pixels (which is converted to  32 x 32pixels to fit the model architecture)  were extracted, including, 198,738 IDC negative examples & 78,786 IDC positive examples. Each image in the dataset is labelled based on the following parameters:

• Patient ID: 10253_idx5
• x-coordinate of the crop: 1,351
• y-coordinate of the crop: 1,101
• Class label: 0 (0 indicates no IDC while 1 indicates IDC)

CNN Architecture used:

1. Used exclusively 3×3 CONV filters, similar to VGGNet
2. Stacked multiple 3×3 CONV filters on top of each other prior to performing max-pooling (again,

similar to VGGNet)

3. But unlike VGGNet, used depthwise separable convolution rather than standard convolution layers
4. Keras Sequential API is used to build CancerNet

The model achieved 86% classification accuracy, 85% sensitivity, and 85% specificity.

CODE REPOSITORY:

https://bitbucket.org/tdequonix/cancer_detect_meetup_resources/src/master/

Enter git clone and the repository URL at your command line:

git clone https://shantanugaur@bitbucket.org/tdequonix/cancer_detect_meetup_resources.git

• build_dataset.py : Builds the dataset by splitting images into training, validation and testing sets.
• cancernet.py : Contains CancerNet breast cancer classification CNN
• train_model.py : Responsible for training and evaluation of Keras classification model

DATASET & PRESENTATION: 

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1kgbtXSkDhDXK1aTCb8l1GvQcOn3iTjZQ

NEXT SESSION:

The next session will be focussed on the Prognostic system. This recently put into clinical practice, is a method that predicts when the cancer is likely to recur in patients that have had their cancers excised.  This gives the physician and the patient better information with which to plan treatment and may eliminate the need for a prognostic surgical procedure. The novel feature of the predictive approach is the ability to handle cases for which cancer has not recurred as well as cases for which cancer has recurred at a specific time.

Driving Digital Awakening Across Enterprises Today

Digital technologies are rapidly reshaping every industry today, and a digital transformation plan is imperative for a company to retain and possibly enhance market share, customer base and shareholders’ interest. The global spend on digital transformation initiatives reached $1.3 trillion in 2017, with the amount expected to near double by 2021.

 A digital transformation plan involves multiple parameters, and involves several complexities. An assiduously charted digital transformation plan is prone to undergo several changes due to the dynamic nature of technologies shaping the industry. Some core aspects of technology components leading change in the industry include advanced analytics, Coe-IoT, mobile technologies, AI & Robotics, RPA & chatbots,cloud computing,AR & VR, etc.

The coupling of granular, real-time data collected through smartphones, connected devices, smart appliances, wearables, mobile commerce, video surveillance, with digital technologies such as cloud native apps, big data architectures, hyper-converged technologies, artificial intelligence, blockchain help to enhance product design & performance, customer experience and faster business decisions through, essentially driving the wave of digital transformation.

 Data, Mobile & Other Technologies Spearheading Digital Transformation

 Data analytics is one of the foremost aspects of digital transformation today. A company’s most critical asset is data – which is now being understood with alacrity now that scientists have understood how to analyse data, extract insights from it and drive a company’s growth in new, undiscovered territories. Gartner says that every major company is wielding data and analytics as competitive weapons, and by 2022, 90% of corporate strategies will explicitly mention information as a critical enterprise asset and analytics as an essential competency. This is because data provides a lot of action points on behaviours and trends of customers, allowing for businesses to process, predict and plan future strategies with precision and accuracy.

 The mobile phone was perhaps one of the most versatile inventions of our time, and has served as a canvas for almost every major transformative technology known to man today. Be it apps, chatbots or technologies enabling connectivity – it all happens on a mobile phone. Being the cornerstone of digital transformation, companies understand the power of a handheld devices in accelerating their growth. Some of the biggest companies today in every major industry are capitalising on the mobile phones and telecom networks. The rapid and continuous communication between a company and its customers is facilitated through the mobile, which is also playing a major role in capturing data.

 The cloud is another transformation technology offering that has changed the way data is stored, and now plays a pivotal role in driving digital transformation. Information and customer data on the cloud is being harnessed by companies to drive and shape strategies. Cloud offerings like Software as a Service, Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a Service has led the way for business models built on and driven by the cloud.

 Other technologies like AI, robotics & robotics process automation (RPA), and chatbots are now being explored extensively for applicability across domains. AI-driven technologies are playing a major role in the way companies, with a focus on information capture and process automation. This has fueled the way for Robotic Process Automation – the catalyst for smarter business decisions today. RPA is redefining the way processes like risk, compliance, accounts & invoice processing, and customer onboarding, and experts believe this is the tip of the iceberg.

 Challenges In Digital Transformation

 Digital transformation programs need the support from the top management and participation from all the functions within the organisation and other stake holders in the ecosystem like customers, and suppliers among others. This is more of a change management process and transformation in the business processes and model. It is a long journey, probably a decade for large organisations. But it is important now to persevere, reassess strategies and embrace digital intervention methods, if companies hope to be change-makers of the future.

Excerpts of speech by Nagarajan Rao, Director, CoE IoT DSAI, Chennai at the BITS Pilani (Goa) 3rdPGP-IoT India cohort.

NASSCOM CoE fostering Innovation and Thought Leadership on Technology for better home healthcare

Owing to lower doctor-to-patient ratios, poor healthcare infrastructure, spiralling costs and long-distance travel for patients, especially in the context of rural India, availing timely healthcare is a challenge today. But fret not. Having a hospital at your doorstep is now a reality, thanks to technology.

The home healthcare market is still in its nascent stages in India but can grow to more than $6.2bn by 2021. Currently, the industry is serviced by a multitude of healthcare start-ups, healthcare aggregators, diagnostic centres, radiology centres and even some of the major hospitals. Advancements in information technology and medical electronics are bringing high quality healthcare at the door step and at affordable price.

According to CB Insights, the new healthcare clinic will be in the comfort of your home largely propagated by healthcare start-ups offering innovative state-of-the-art care kits. The report states that companies are launching kits for everything ranging from sequencing the microbiome and DNA testing for healthcare risks on one end of the spectrum, to low cost standard diagnostics on the other end.

Deep-Tech Start-ups at NASSCOM india iot are providing innovative healthcare solutions

NASSCOM iot india, in its true sense of fostering innovation and being a trendsetter, has been working with some innovative start-ups that are directly addressing critical healthcare issues. These start-ups are working on some of the common challenges in the society such as; Diabetes, Blood Pressure, Cardio Vascular Diseases, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Diseases, Maternal Mortality, Infant Mortality, Cataract, Glaucoma, geriatric care etc. where the services are offered through clinically certified and highly mobile diagnostic devices. Besides diagnostics, these start-ups are also providing Personal Health-Records (PHR) to the individual customers on their mobile devices.  Layered with AI assisted insights, the subjects (individuals) are driven towards preventive health and wellness. The innovations are also helping the doctors and hospitals in monitoring their patients from their own homes.

“Home Healthcare is still in its nascent stages but soon it is going to grow exponentially, mainly due to increased awareness campaigns and mobile penetration across the country. Players such as Nightingale and Portea are ahead of the others but haven’t yet dug deep. Rise in aging population is another reason the market is going to see the growth towards north. Interestingly, this market is going to have a ripple effect on micro-entrepreneurship and job creation. Evangelization of the need for wellness by the Government, is also catalysing the growth in this market. Health Insurance companies are also observing this market and may soon come out with new collaboration models to minimize their risk. But the Home Healthcare market needs regulatory guidance and standard delivery models.”

Raghuram Janapareddy

Director – Lifesciences & Healthcare

NASSCOM Center of Excellence

LHIF – Lifesciences & Healthcare Innovation Forum is a flagship program of NASSCOM CoE, providing a collaborative platform for catalysing the transformation of healthcare in India.