MotionEngine Wear software for IoT

MotionEngine Wear targeting a distinct set of features

According to the press release, the MotionEngine Wear will provide a set of applications that includes:

Accurate Activity Tracking: Algorithms specifically tuned for wearable devices can automatically track a variety of users’ daily physical activities such as walking and running, steps taken and stairs climbed to provide an assessment of exercise program effectiveness.

Advanced Sleep Monitoring: The proprietary sleep-state algorithm uses a low power method to capture motion data related to users’ sleep quality and present results.

Context Awareness: Automatic detection of when the user is in a vehicle, such as a car, or if the user is riding a bicycle to allow the user interface to adapt to different modes of use.

Precise Compass Heading and Orientation: Hillcrest’s industry-leading calibration and sensor fusion algorithms ensure precise, drift- and jitter-free device orientation and compass heading to provide the foundation for navigation applications.

Intuitive Gesture Controls: Users can perform motion gestures to interact naturally with devices, such as the “glance” gesture which is used to detect when a user looks at the front-facing screen.

While the sleep monitoring will appeal to consumers or potentially medical device manufacturers, the rest of these features work as well for business users as they do anyone else. HR departments are increasingly looking to the health of their users providing an real opportunity for some device manufacturers to not only link to phones for the novelty value of email on a device too small to read but to provide key data to HR.

One area where this is becoming increasingly important is in manual workforces especially those that operate in dangerous environments such as mining, steel manufacturing and even industries such as farming and high tech component manufacturing.

To help device manufacturers speed up their development, Hillcrest Labs are also offering their BNO070 9-axis System in Package (SIP) sensor. This was developed with Bosch Sensortec and contains many of the key biometric sensors that will enable workforce monitoring.

Hillcrest Labs has already announced Alcatel Onetouch Watch and the Open-source Virtual Reality (OSVR) from Razer as customers and given the breadth of apps it has put into the MotionWear Engine, it should be announcing more soon.

Conclusion

Getting IoT devices to market has been a struggle for large and small companies. With Intel and OVH offering a €1 million bounty for IoT apps and now Hillcrest Labs shipping the MotionWear Engine, the build-up to the critical Christmas market could see a flood of devices coming to market.

Hopefully with MotionEngine Wear, many of those devices will be fully functional not something that gets discarded by Boxing Day.