Driven by the success of products such the Sony PlayStation, the Microsoft (News - Alert) Xbox, the iPhone and the Tom-Tom, much of today’s discussion of smart, always-connected devices revolves around products that call home to upload real-time local conditions or to download timely service updates.

 

There is another type of smart product that doesn’t call home but rather communicates with other smart products in the immediate surroundings. Some of these such as the home thermostat that communicates with the HVAC systems have been around so long and are so ubiquitous that we perhaps don’t even think of them in terms of being smart, always-on, always-connected products but they meet the definition of a smart product just as much as does an iPhone (News - Alert).

 

There are companies and products that are bridging the gap between these two types of smart products. The iControl and Control4 products discussed in a previous posting are literal bridges that connect devices with only local communication capabilities to the Internet and the world at large.

 

The GlowCap by Vitality is another a little less literal example of such a bridge. The GlowCap itself is a special cap for a medicine bottle that senses when it is removed in the process of pill taking. If this doesn’t happen according to the prescription, the GlowCap wirelessly communicates with an Internet-connected night light that at first emits light and sound to remind you to take your meds and then, if you still don’t stay on your medication schedule does call home to get somebody’s attention.

 

Home health monitoring devices such as the GlowCap are in the forefront of building these local-to-Internet bridges. ViTel Net takes the GlowCap paradigm an additional step. ViTel Net makes a number of devices that communicate with in-home and assisted-living health monitoring units, integrates and analyzes their combined readings, gives the patient user-friendly health information and feedback, and, if necessary, sends the data upstream to medical personnel.

 

The TrackStick is one of many examples of another type of local/global bridging. In detached mode, the Trackstick is a GPS receiver that continuously records where it is located, creating a log of travel in the car, for example. Connected to the Internet, the location path recorded in the Trackstick is analyzed with respect to maps in order, for example, to compute a more efficient routing approach.

 

The smart meter fits the same paradigm except that the meter stays still as it records measurements and the global link has to come to it. Long-time meter manufacturers such as GE, Elster, Iskraemeco, Itron and Landis+Gyr are making such meters for the home energy market while companies such as IntelliPark are making these kinds of meters for parking.

 

SmartSynch is following the iControl/Control4 concentrator-and-backhaul game plan in the smart meter arena by rolling out their SmartRouting Solution that connects smart meters from different meter manufacturers.

 

For low value measurements in cost-sensitive applications, it is not feasible to endow each smart device with the embedded wireless capabilities that essentially replicate a mobile phone. There are a number of ways of collecting the logs of many smart devices such as smart meters that only have connectivity in a very limited range. One way, of course, is to have somebody come by and trigger the meter to broadcast its recordings to a data collection device.

 

Another way is to have the devices communicate with each other in a relay or bucket-brigade manner. The devices pass their measurements onto the neighboring devices. Step-by-step all the measurements are swept upstream to a collection point where the measurements are then sent home.

 

All of which brings us full circle to the dawn of the Internet. ALOHAnet, one of the very first computer networks and pre-dating the Internet, was a data packet relay network built in the 1970s in Hawaii. Long gone and long forgotten, it may live again in your home.