IoT news of the week for August 14, 2020



Honeywell is getting the collaborative spirit:  Honeywell, which recently signed a partnership with SAP to help organizations understand the financial performance of their buildings, has signed onto another collaboration, this time with oil services giant Halliburton. The focus here is on both collaboration and bringing data from each company’s software to build new products and services. This is where the internet of things can really start to create value, because no one company will have all of the data necessary to document a business process. It’s worth paying attention to these deals, noting how well they actually progress and what customers adopt. That way we can track if customers are really buying into the promise of IoT and, in turn, delivering value as part of an ecosystem. ( Seeking Alpha )
We’re finally ready to talk about standards for consumer wearables for medical-grade use cases : Silicon Valley has rushed to deliver wellness products in the form of activity trackers, sleep trackers, connected blood pressure cuffs, and EKG devices that run on your smartphone. But for the most part, these aren’t sufficient for medical-grade use cases because the data they produce isn’t standardized or consistently tested in peer-reviewed studies. With the rush toward the remote monitoring of patients and remotely conducted clinical trials, the medical device industry is calling for Silicon Valley to help corral the Wild West of Data that has emerged. In this essay, the authors call for companies to sign on to use standard, clinically validated methodologies for data collecting and sharing so researchers can compare results from patients wearing Fitbits to those wearing Apple Watches. Because while it’s fine if proprietary algorithms are used for the consumer-facing apps, for clinical trials, there needs to be more transparency. ( Stat )
COVID cuts smart home revenue estimates:  ABI Research says that in 2020, smart home device spending will rise by 4% from the prior year, to $85 billion. However, the new figure represents a $14.1 billion decline in predicted sales, since prior to the pandemic analysts expected spending to rise by 21%. This data actually surprised me because it suggests that COVID-19 has cut the adoption of smart home devices despite many of us spending far more time at home. Given that job losses and economic uncertainty make it hard to shell out $50 for a smart light bulb, and that expensive security cameras aren’t really necessary if you never leave home, I guess the data makes sense. But I also wonder how many people are, like me, tired of reading about privacy violations and devices that lose their functionality and/or have security flaws. ( CE Pro )
It’s a cardiologist in a box?  A startup called Bodyport has raised $11.2 million for its connected scale, which is designed to measure health. The scale is part of an overall medical-grade service that links a patient to their...

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