In the later half of 2011, Cambridge Consultants ran a workshop in Boston, MA, with senior delegates from some of the worlds leading blue chips in health and consumer, such as adidas, Robert Bosch Healthcare, Unilever, and Philips Healthcare, as well as some ambitious start up companies such as MC10 and Innovative Sleep Solutions.  This select group came together to debate the topic of ‘The business of health and wellness; engaging consumers and making money’.

Now you may have expected this group to come up with the usual group of apps and gadgets that often get talked about in the media (and our own Rachel Harker talked about these in her blog back in July last year), and it is true to say that there is an ever growing demand for these types of products.  However, for me, the biggest finding to have come out of this workshop was a belief that the established players in the consumer goods and medical sectors face the threat of losing their market position to a whole new generation of algorithm-driven companies as the two sectors emerge.

According to Duncan Smith, who heads up Cambridge Consultants product and system development division, the report explores two key points of view around successful revenue models: one, that profit will be driven by reimbursement for solutions demonstrating a reduction in healthcare costs; two, that success will lie in directly targeting consumers and engaging them in improving their own health and well-being. Both views come together around the prediction that healthcare will become increasingly personalised, moving away from treatment to lifestyle management. Through the innovative use of health data, managed by complex algorithms (not dissimilar to those already used by companies such Google and eBay in their own spaces), the scene is potentially set for a new – dominant – name in the industry to emerge, a company that trawls health data and uses it to help people live healthier lives.

Duncan, along with colleagues who are product development experts in areas such as wireless communications and consumer products, will all be attending CES next week, where they will be exploring how the findings of this report will impact the consumer products market directly over the next five years.  Details on how to get in touch with the team at CES can be found here.

As I see it, there are a number of inherent problems in the way things are currently done that almost guarantee the outcome outlined above. Amongst these are:

• Mixed agendas, for example, the best value solution versus supporting the British economy versus supporting innovation and complying with treaty obligations such as EU free trade rules versus benefits in marginal seats
• A total lack of understanding of the cost of delay. Most governments and bureaucracies get criticised in the media for projects that go wrong, paradoxically they get little criticism for doing nothing and yet this always comes with cost escalation
• An ability to always see the limitations in commercial off the shelf solutions whilst being blind to the limitations of custom solutions. There’s a strange psychology of looking backwards criticising custom solutions specified by government and yet looking forwards always choosing yet another custom solution
• A lack of technology understanding in government leading to an inability to understand the cost drivers of “requirements”. This is characterised by committees adding a few requirements oblivious to the billions in cost being added
• The smaller projects tend to run better because the costs and benefits are more readily understood and the people running them have a better overall understanding without the drag from committees and hierarchies of management and approval

Successful innovation in the private sector is, in many ways, more conservative, but also much more effective. So when Apple created the iPAD it didn’t try to recreate everything; it uses WiFi, the internet, 3G. When Banks introduced computer banking, they used PCs and the internet. There’s usually a controlling mind rather than a levelling down committee. The project builds strongly on other R&D in the world and so remains up to date with time. In contrast, around much of the world, governments are currently engaged in SMART metering projects where they seem to think that recreating a government communications infra-structure is necessary rather than using the internet. The process involves large committees from government, energy companies and other stakeholders. Very little ever gets subtracted in this process, it intrinsically loads more costs as it crawls slowly into the future, whilst delaying decisions. In doing this they will create a single point to attack for cyber-criminals and hostile states and big databases that they will not succeed in keeping confidential. The cost of these projects is huge, typically 5-10 billion pounds and they’re only in the planning stage so they’ll probably cost much more. The assumed benefits are largely efficiency savings in the energy companies (relating to management of bad debts, automatic switching of consumers from credit to pay as you go tariffs) companies rather than reduction in carbon through energy efficiency. And wasn’t that meant to be the reason for introducing these meters in the first place (trouble is the carbon savings don’t justify the ticket price).

So whilst everyone is busy at this time of year making predictions of what 2012 will bring, I thought I would share some of mine:

• SMART Meter roll-out will not be achieved by 2020 – the government process continually delays the start without changing the end date
• The project costs will grow to more than £15 billion for the initial roll out
• And then the system will be obsolete in less than a decade and if the benefits are really required, the same order of cost will be expended again
• Consumers will probably hate the result when they see the impact on their privacy and the action the energy companies take against vulnerable people such as cutting their energy supply remotely (whether as a result of a dispute or a mistake)
• Carbon saving will be minimal (<3%); the country would achieve much more by spending the same amount on insulating buildings

I truly hope I’m proved wrong before it is too late. The stakes, after all, are high for us all.

The implicit trade-off is between parameters like convenience, vulnerability and upgradeability. Upgradeability allows convenient remote fixing of problems and addition of features – but the fact that the application can be changed creates an opportunity for someone to insert code that does something malicious. In the banking area, in many cases, the cost of on line fraud has been borne by financial instituitions rather than the individual so the individual has not had to bear the cost of the vulnerability so many consumers implicitly value the convenience and don’t have to ascribe much of a cost to the vulnerability.

But where is this all going? Connected systems can provide useability benefits in alomost every area, but at the cost of vulnerabilities. For instance, many countries have ambitious programs for smart metering. These include customer benefits like remote meter reading calling time on the typically inaccurate estimated bills that are often generated by the computers of the major energy companies. But in some countries the plans are more ambitious; so, for instance with a smart meter with a two way radio link, a remote command can be used to switch off the energy supply, which is perceived to be a benefit by the energy companies in managing difficult customers who can’t or won’t pay for their energy. This creates vulnerabilities like if a vulnerable person’s energy is switched off during winter, they might die of hyperthermia before the bureaucracy can decide to solve the problem and of course some of the energy companies are not renowned for sensitive and efficient customer service.

And this is not limited to finance and energy. Demographic changes mean that we are all living longer and surviving longer with chronic healthcare conditions. Mounting costs drive innovation in medical devices that enable them to provide self-administered therapies  and with the addition of connection, remote patient compliance monitoring. This can lead to security vulnerabilities that might endanger patient health or confidentiality.

From a technological point of view, it is possible to design extremely secure connected  systems, but that needs to be designed in at the outset not retrofitted. The vulnerabilities in these systems are almost always an arms race, where malicious attacks have to be responded to with upgrades. In general the higher the complexity, the more the vulnerabilities and too often systems are made over-complex and overlook the vulnerabilities created. So going back to the smart meter example – if you extend a remote meter reading provision through remote switch off and finally to a connected smart grid, you may be able to manage a greener infrastucture, but you may also open yourself to a hacker attack that takes down isolated or large parts of that supply network. Lack of clarity about the scope and reasons for the extension of scope tend to exaccerbate these vulnerabilities.

In Alan’s last blog, he talked about how businesses need to not only make technology breakthroughs, but continuously improve technologies and adapt them to market opportunities. Having described 30 years worth of technology development, he left us hanging with the promise of the best was yet to come.  Well, a couple of days ago, we announced it in the form of our latest spin-out company: Aveillant.

For those of you who read my blog entitled ‘Wind farms on a collision course’, you’ll know that wind farms cause a major headache for air traffic controllers – both civil and military – in so much as they are unable to distinguish between which is which when the aircraft passes overhead, creating areas of uncertainty that is unacceptable to both aviation safety and national security.  The problem is so large that in the UK alone, according to Renewable UK, 66% of all wind farm applications, equating to 6.5 gigawatts of electricity, are being delayed due to this problem.  Put another way, that’s the equivalent to around 2300 turbines, which could otherwise be making a significant difference to helping us reach our renewable energy target.

Aveillant addresses this concern through the clever use of holographic radar which is able to ‘separate’ even small aircraft from the wind farms, and has been designed to work with existing primary radar systems to ‘fill in the gaps’ in a very cost effective way.  As well as support from Cambridge Consultants, the new company has also received funding from VC firm DFJ Esprit and from the U.K. wind industry’s funding body, the Aviation Investment Fund.  That said, with a solution to a global problem firmly in its sights, a second round of funding is expected next year.

In just a few days, the news of Aveillant has gone global getting coverage on major consumer sites such as CNET (worth a read) through to leading entrepreneur magazine, Fast Company (also worth a read), and a hundred others.

Aveillant has two founder members, one of which – Dr Gordon Oswald – who also played a key role in the development of holographic radar and was involved in the early measurement of sea ice thickness in the Arctic.  Having spent some time on the ice, I thought it might be interesting to see what he remembers from the seminal project to work out the possibility of placing oil rigs in his hostile territory some 30 years ago.  His one memory… “Polar Bears are big.  Very big!”.    Funny how a technology first created to solve an oil industry issue, has now come full circle to help the world get off its dependency on fossil fuels.

* and for the music aficionados, this song title was – ironically – sung by Peter, Paul and Mary who were also famous for singing ‘Leaving on a jet plane’.  Well, now I guess they can!

At Cambridge Consultants, one strand of our business has been in a niche area of radar since the 1980s and we have created a succession of measurement and detection tools optimised for shorter range applications, typically up to about 30 metres range.

In the 1980s, we developed the Advanced Radar Missile Scorer, the first qualified non cooperative missile scoring system that has been used in missile evaluation and pilot training in UK, US, France, Italy and Australia and is still in production today. We also developed the Exstar radar, which was able to measure the thickness of arctic sea ice floes from a helicopter at a time when the altenrative was labroiously drilling cores through the ice to see how thick it was. With that new technology, oil companies could measure more ice in a day than they could in a season by the manual drilling method and that was an important enabling technology to offshore oil exploitation in arctic regions. Climate change and the retreat of sea ice has made this less important(!) In the 1990s, the same technology was adapted to process industry applications (a very resilient and accurate liquid level sensor) and to short range sensing applications around cars.

After 2001, with the new threats from terrorists, there was increasing need for tools to aid the security forces in hostage situations. We developed Prism 200 which has been sold around the world and offers intuitive imaging through the walls of a building where hostages are being held. In 2011, this won the Queen’s Award for Enterprise in the Innovation category.

Most recently by adding the kind of massively parallel real-time processing now available, we have been able to create a “software radar” analogous to “software radio” where beamforming is done in the digital domain. This extends the range of this technology to hundreds of meters to ten kilometres depending on the application. It exploits our  complementary capabilities in radar and digital signal processing for software radio that have underpinned some of our innovative wireless product development in low power integrated circuits and small base station development. The advantage of this kind of sensor is its abiltiy to operate in an environment with dynamic clutter in a way that is impossible for normal scanning radars. One lead application is the training crews against the terrorist threat from fast attack boats by the US Navy.

Buts its the next application that is the most exciting yet.

As an innovative product development company we get involved – not surprisingly – with all sorts of new product development; from coffee machines through to cardiac monitors. But once in a while, we have to develop products that can work truly on the edge…. in some of the most inhospitable places in the world, and when a small error can be the difference between life and death.

Client confidentiality is paramount to a firm like us, but one new development we have been given permission to talk about is the development of Iridium’s latest satellite phone; the Iridium Extreme™.

Naturally the phone is extremely rugged (it’s the first satellite phone with US DoD Standard 810F durability) and it can communicate from anywhere on the planet. And as well as being Iridium’s lightest handset yet, it also includes some really cool new features.

Imagine for a minute that you are a lone worker out in the Arctic tundra, someone checking a pipeline, for example. It’s -15c outside your truck and the weather is set to get worse, with a blizzard blowing in;   Forget your cell phone; there’s no way that will get a signal (after all GSM only covers about 1% of the worlds surface).  The Iridium Extreme could just become your new best friend.  For a start, the phone offers real-time tracking so you, and often more importantly your backup team, know where you are the whole time, and it also offers ‘geo-fencing’ capability.  A geo-fence is a virtual perimeter for a real-world geographic area letting others know  as you stray out of a predefined area.

The other feature that really caught my attention was a new SOS function, so that rather than having to try and dial a number, you simply have to flip the cover and press the SOS button, and someone is immediately alerted that you’re in trouble and in need of help.  I’m not sure if you watched the film about the mountain climber Aron Ralston who became trapped by a boulder in Robbers Roost, Utah.  I won’t spoil the – somewhat gruesome – story for those that haven’t seen it, but I can’t help wonder how different Aron’s experience would have been, had he been carrying one of these phones with him.

To see a video of this latest development,   click here

This is not a new argument. For all terrestrial purposes and the overhwelming majority of solar system issues, Newton’s 17C Theory of Gravity is entirely adequate and Einstein’s General Relativity of 1915 an elegant and obscure refinement. However, the GPS system is based on orbiting atomic clocks and the computation of position has to take into account the General Relativistic correction arising from the accelerating clocks. So safety in navigation and a host of consumer goods and location services would not exist without General Relativity. If a set of politicians had insisted on a set of proposals for research with application to navigation, it is extremely unlikely that the proposal would have included work out why the orbit of Mercury is odd and in so doing enable precise navigation anywhere on the planet. Fundamental understanding of the way things work is the first fundamental step in innovation but it is unlikely that a particular business would fund CERN because with this kind of research, the application errors are highly uncertain. The UK should be increasing its funding of science research if it believes the knowledge economy is going to rebalance an over dependence on financial services. So my bet is that finding the Higgs Boson (or proving it doesn’t exist) will have spin off benefits but they’ll be decades down the track before we recognise them in every day life. This should not limit our enthusiasm to fund it as understanding the universe is fundamental to being human.

So what does this arms race produce? It is simpler to arrange multiple simultaneous riots, simpler to disperse and regroup in the face of police response, but possibly harder to remain anonymous and evade capture.

What else can happen? Well, don’t be surprised if the police and security services start innovating by developing software that analyzes messaging traffic to predict the locations of troublespots before the riot and identifies participants and instigators before the event. And if this becomes feasible their might also be clamour for offences based on this traffic either to be put explicitly on the statutes or for existing statutes to interpreteds against people using social media in certain ways. In some ways, just as with 9/11, the magnitude of the atrocity drives the level of innovation in the response from society. Of course, such technological responses carry civil libertarian questions because once the technology is there, it might be used in circumstance shwere there might be less universal agreement on the end being pursued.

So you develop products?  Yes, but really innovative ones.  So you’re a trendy industrial design house?  Well, yes but that’s only a small part of it.  So you’re engineers?  Well yes but again that’s not it alone.  And this goes on.   In fact a colleague of mine, who specialises in designing very clever bits of silicon (ASICS), hit the nail on the head earlier today when he said “the problem is that once a client has worked with us, they completely get us.  But we’re not you’re typical large technology consulting firm that just consults, and we’re not the low level technology integrators that can sell you a chunk of tech.. we sit in the middle.”  Sure we have technology, and yes we have a consulting arm, but the truth is that clients who know us come to us, typically with a difficult, hairy problem and want us to solve it… irrelevant of whether it’s a coffee machine or dialysis machine, a satellite phone or the Bluetooth that sits in your mobile phone.

I could bang on about how we have all the key skills – from human factors through to signal processing and algorithm development all in house.  But most people start to glaze over at this point, so we thought we’d do it a different way, and show you how to develop a brilliant product in just 60 seconds.   Click here and hold onto your hat….

Perhaps more realistically, many believe that onshore and offshore wind together could deliver 30% of the UK’s electricity supply by 2020 and be part of a radical decarbonisation of the economy by 2030.

But there’s a problem even with this number.  A £12billion, 6 gigawatt problem.

Currently, half of all windfarm developments in the UK face objections from aviation stakeholders on the grounds of radar interference, obstruction or impact to low flying.  And to a lesser or greater extent, depending on geography, the problem isn’t just limited to the UK but is actually global.

Put simply, the rotating blades of a turbine create problems for both military and civil radar system.  The blades create ‘clutter’ on the radar up to 60,000ft (18,000 meters) in the sky, and means that any aircraft flying within the vicinity of a windfarm simply becomes indistinguishable on the radar operator’s screen.  A light aircraft traveling at relatively low speeds can literally disappear from view for over a minute. Not good news and something that those in the industry are clearly concerned about.   Site the windfarm on the landing and take off path of any airport and you can see how the problem quickly becomes critical. This presents governments around the world with a conflict of interest between their need to quickly switch to renewable energy sources and the preservation of national security and air-traffic control integrity.

Various solutions have been proposed to try and fix this problem, including covering the turbine blades in stealth materials, complex computer algorithms that predict a plane’s flight path, or other – major – modifications and upgrades to existing radar systems.  All of these solutions offer the potential to help the situation, but equally all are only partial fixes – and as a company that specializes in innovative product development, we believe that there should be a no-degradation solution.

Last year we successfully trialed our own technology using a remote control helicopter which we were able to fly to within a few feet of a turbine situated near Swaffham in Norfolk.  Those who saw the results – which clearly differentiated and plotted the path of the helicopter as it approached and navigated around the turbine – claimed to be impressed.  However, this was just a trial, and as of last week we are now being given the opportunity to start to develop a fully scaled up system for the region surrounding Glasgow Prestwick Airport (GPA).   The area is strategically important to the growth of the UK wind industry, with the potential for hundreds of turbines, however, these are currently ‘on hold’ without an effective solution to mitigate interference to the airport’s Primary Radar systems that would be caused by the turbines. Many competing technical solutions have been proposed to deal with this issue, but Cambridge Consultants’ Holographic Radar was found to best suit GPA’s operational requirement and offers greater deployment flexibility than current alternative technologies. The initial feasibility study is estimated to take approximately two months to complete, however, if this stage is successfully, we hope that it will pave the way to opening up a no-degradation solution, which in turn could release tens of gigawatt of power from this renewable source around the world.

If you have an interest in wind farm radar issues, there is a specialist group can be found here on Linked In.