2023 Rewind With Raymond Yin | The Tech Between Us

Introduction

Welcome to the 2023 wrap up episode of The Tech Between Us, exclusively available for subscribers. Let's take a look back at the technologies we covered this season and discuss new developments, favorite moments, and more. Thank you for your continued support and be sure to catch up on anything you may have missed from our Empowering Innovation Together content series at mouser.com/empowering-innovation.

Raymond Commentary
Here we are at the end of another year. They seem to fly by so quickly these days. It feels like we just took down the holiday decorations and they're already back up again. And as always with the end of the year come the inevitable flurry of review and reflections at the past 12 months. Well, who are we to buck tradition? With that said, welcome to the last episode of Tech Between Us for 2023 and to our year in review. I’m afraid you’re stuck with listening to just me ramble on alone today. Though I’m actually far from alone in our studio. There’s Erik who is monitoring the cameras and recording equipment trying to remember if he pressed “record” on number 4. We also have Katy (with a y) who is desperately hoping I stay on topic and not go off on a random tangent and Katie (with an ie) who will simply edit it out if I do. And finally, there’s Heidi who is overseeing everything, but is really checking the pickleball tournament scores on her phone. Katy is now glaring at me so I guess that means I should start.

GESS Introduction

We started the year talking with Dr. Imre Gyuk, who was recently named the first ever Chief Scientist for Energy Storage at the US Dept of Energy. As we noted in April, Dr Gyuk has devoted over three decades to technological innovation and advancement in energy storage. Congrats Imre, very well deserved!

While we talked a lot about the various storage technologies being used today including wide band gap semiconductors in inverters and DC/DC converters, it was the Energy Storage for Social Equity program that he was most proud to be associated with and really caught my attention. The primary goal of the program from Pacific Northwest and Sandia National Laboratories is to bring energy storage technologies to rural, tribal, and indigenous disadvantaged communities affected by unreliable and expensive energy systems today. Imre mentioned that of the 60 requests, 14 had moved on in the review process. Earlier in the summer, four of these requests were approved for millions of dollars in funding and are moving to the project development stage, including installation of off-grid residential solar and storage systems in the Navajo Nation and the Hopi Tribe and deployment of residential solar and battery storage nano-grids to households on the Hawaiian island of Moloka’i. Wow, a government program that actually works! Now, let's listen back to a moment in our conversation about Dr. Imre's projects with underdeveloped societies.

Raymond Yin:
What has been your most rewarding energy project to date?

Imre Gyuk:
Working with Picuris Pueblo in New Mexico - having a group of people who are pushing to become energy independent and helping them get there, it’s a fantastic experience. Plus, it's a somewhat new environment. Or, if you want, traveling through Australia from end-to-end preaching storage. At that time, Australia had not yet decided to pursue any kind of program in storage, and they enabled me to go around, as I said, end to end from Sydney to Perth and lecture around storage and tell them about the advantages, the potential advantages of storage. And then a year later it's happened, and the government put in a storage program. Or another one, funding a hydropower project in an Alaskan village. Very remote, you have to fly in or go by boat. But seeing that the hydropower now works better because we have coupled it with storage, or I mentioned the high school in Albuquerque, cutting the ribbon there with mariachi music playing. It's a great experience! So, they all offer something.

Matter Introduction

Next, Chris LaPré, Head of Technology for the Connectivity Standards Alliance joined us in June to talk about the Matter protocol which allows smart home devices to communicate with each other regardless of ecosystem. A seemingly impossible task given the size and scope of the various companies involved in the home automation market, but it is happening. In the six months since talking with Chris, there have been over 25,000 downloads of the Matter spec, over 1200 certified products, a 24% increase in the number of companies in the CSA and 8,526 puns on the word Matter across media. OK, I admit that we’re guilty of it as well, but it’s just so tempting! With the release of the 1.2 spec in late October, the Matter protocol now supports nine additional device types including robotic vacuums, smoke and fire alarms, and air quality sensors. Many other devices were automatically made Matter-compatible with a simple over-the-air software update including over 100million Echo devices from Amazon. One of the key features of Matter that didn’t change in 1.2 is the built in security standards that keep your smart home from looking dumb as hackers use default passwords or force devices to run malicious code.  Chris gives an outstanding explanation of the different levels of security that all Matter-compliant devices must meet. For me, the huge “ah-ha!” moment during our discussion came when he described how an elderly person can be unobtrusively monitored without cameras to make sure they’re safe and healthy. Almost time to upgrade my mom’s house. Let's listen to that key moment again.

Chris LaPré:
Let's say your aging mother, I don't know if she lives alone or not, but, if you're concerned about her during the day, you can basically keep track of her or better yet, not keep track of her.  Her home can just keep track and say, yes, she woke up on time. I don't need to tell Raymond anything. She's walking around just like she did yesterday. She opened the fridge, she made her coffee, everything's great. But then, as soon as she starts slowing down a little bit, or if she's fallen, certainly right away, or she hasn't gotten up, an hour later than usual, they can maybe send you a little notification saying, hey, something's amiss here. Maybe you should just text her, check on her. Or do whatever you want to do with what the level of concern is. All those devices we already have in place, the motion sensors, the door locks, the appliances we talked about, all of that is how we can get a lot of information on aging in place. And then the example that some people keep mentioning to me, if someone has fallen, they can't get up and have a smart door lock. When the emergency service is on the other side of the door, unlock the door and not have them break down that door to get through. Those sorts of things. Again, a door lock is something we already have. So, there’s increasing levels of care, early discharge or monitoring of glucose, persistent care.

Raymond Yin:
Aging in place, that is brilliant. Just having the experience of my mom. She does live alone. Luckily my brother is close, but to have the technology to be able to unobtrusively keep track of her. We don't want to put anybody in her house, but yeah, of course, at this age, we're a little concerned at times.

Chris LaPré:
And she should have privacy too, right? You don't want cameras all over her house where if something's wrong, you pop on a camera and you’re spying. This is much lower key than that. Just notify me if something's amiss. And now with all these machine learning algorithms, they can do a really great job at detecting what is a meaningful discrepancy versus a non-meaningful discrepancy.

Digital Therapeutics Introduction

We then talked to Dr Smit Patel, Associate Program Director at the Digital Medicine Society, about a new area of digital medicine known as Digital Therapeutics. This intersection of medical therapies, software, and sometimes hardware was fascinating and is helping manage chronic illnesses such as diabetes or even mental health and ADHD in adults and children in ways that are both effective and inexpensive and often without the time and enormous cost of traditional pharmaceutical solutions.

Our team in Europe has been working with Stix Mindfulness, a digital therapeutics start up based in London that helps children manage anxiety and form a more resilient mindset. Our Editor and Project Coordinator, Aakriti Kaushik, recently sat down with them to learn more about how they came up with their Stix Remotes as an alternative to medication. You can read more about it in the link below.

Smit also spoke of how regulatory issues could be roadblocks to the overall adoption of digital therapies, but it looks like things are looking up there, at least in the US. The Access to Prescription Digital Therapeutics Act is slowly winding its way through Congress with educational sessions recently held on Capitol Hill and the Food and Drug Administration is now putting a Digital Health advisory committee together to assist in areas such as AI, wearables, and digital therapeutics. Here's a brief bit from our conversation with Dr. Patel.

Raymond Yin:
So, you're saying that the digital therapeutics have a similar efficacy to pharmaceutical solutions.

Smit Patel:
Yes, one of the things that even as a clinician we don't want is, and as a parent, rightly, we don't want kids to give pills and more and more pills when we can have a digital solution to it. So yes, the EndeavorRX, which is FDA cleared product, has really strong results. It has been tested for the last seven years in clinical trials to show the efficacy levels as good as the drugs that are being taken for example, in Adderall, in comparative settings, and it has been shown, impressive results for ADHD. I'm an adult, I don't even have ADHD, and I want to play that video game just to improve my attention span and focus. Imagine that for kids.

Raymond Yin:
Yeah! If that was around that would've been the way my son would've gone, rather than the Adderall. There are all kinds of issues with medication. Whereas it seems that the regimen for the digital therapeutic is four weeks and we're done.

Environmental Sensors Introduction

Next up was our fellow foodie and indoor air quality expert, Ronan Cooney, Head of Products for Ambisense. With this year’s flu season in full swing, attention is once again on the state of our indoor air quality. And unlike Digital Therapeutics, there doesn’t seem to be any legislative movement, at least in this country, to create national standards for Indoor Air Quality. Now let's take a look back at our podcast conversation with Ronan.

Raymond Yin:
What area could benefit most from being more aware of indoor air quality and actually making a concerted effort to improve indoor air quality? What would you say would be the biggest impact?

Ronan Cooney:
I think that's the construction industry. If they can embed indoor air quality sensors from the very start and even retrofitting, they're going to be the key really to all of this. That it's embedded from the very start, and they can put these sensors in and maintain them and the data. We're working already with some construction companies in Ireland around that, that they're embedding it into those construction, projects from the very start. And then they can give a password or whatever to an owner and they could have their account then, and they can see their own in their air quality and they can monitor it and things like that as well.

WiFi7 Introduction

We closed the year with a deep dive into an up-and-coming technology innovation: WiFi7. And by “we,” I mean the collective Mouser “we” since that episode was hosted by none other than my friend and colleague, Mark Patrick, Director of Technical Content for Mouser in Europe. He had an excellent conversation with Bruno Tomas, the Chief Technical Officer of the Wireless Broadband Alliance about how WiFi7 is building on prior technologies that enable it to be more than twice as fast as current systems. While Mark and Bruno talked about location applications and emergency services to be the societal changing use cases, I personally can’t wait to upgrade my gaming rig and home network yet again with the new WiFi7 products coming out later next year. Mark did a fantastic job on this episode. Stay tuned to more from him in 2024.  Now let's listen to an excerpt from their conversation.

Mark Patrick:
What do you think are the new applications and sectors Wi-Fi 7 will enable things that will really make a difference in life generally aside from gaming?

Bruno Tomas:
It’s something we don't often mention, but emergency services. If you just think about some of the unfortunate event with the climate change, we have been seeing some fire, some flooding, and the authorities, they're looking into more solutions to compliment the first responder systems. And Wi-Fi with some of the new capabilities introduced is being positioned also as one of the technologies that will address and cater to the emergency services use cases. Mainly because if you have a fixed backhaul that is covered and not affected by a catastrophe, you can still operate some endpoints of Wi-Fi and allow the communication to flow. So that's when I would say our colleagues to monitor because that might be truly transformative if everyone has to deploy Wi-Fi and open it for emergency services can bring a new layer of usability.

Closing

And that's a wrap! 2023 is officially in the can, as they say. I've learned so much from our tech between us guests this year, and I want to thank them all again for providing such amazing insight into their respective areas. And we want to thank all of our subscribers who have supported this podcast and our entire Empowering Innovation Together program throughout the years. We love discussing the latest and upcoming technologies and hope you've enjoyed listening along. We'll be back in 2024 with more in-depth looks at the technologies impacting our world. Until then, explore more from Mouser’s Empowering Innovation Together content series by visiting mouser.com/empowering-innovation. And finally, from all of us here at Mouser Electronics, have a wonderful holiday season.