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| Kinetic offers IoT-enabled workers' comp insurance |
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| By Kevin Tofel |
This week, I saw the first instance of IoT being used in insurance outside of the auto industry. Nationwide Insurance and Kinetic, a seven-year-old maker of a wearable device that tracks worker movements, have launched a policy for workers' compensation.
Companies will buy the policy from Kinetic and deploy its wearable among their workforces. The goal is to reduce the number of repetitive strain and other injuries associated with labor-heavy jobs such as those found in health care, construction, etc. Not only does Kinetic's device track movement patterns, it vibrates when someone wearing it moves in a potentially harmful way, alerting them to make a change. |
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| — Workers wear Kinetic's pager-sized device at their waist. Image courtesy of Kinetic. |
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Kinetic has reduced repetitive-stress and other injuries among its customers' employees by 50% to 60%, according to an actuarial study. Such results, coupled with the need to expand its customer base beyond self-insured clients, led the company to team up with investor Nationwide to build an IoT-enabled workers' compensation policy.
This is exciting for a lot of reasons. For years, I've waited for the insurance world to take advantage of real-time data to anticipate and prevent problems before they turn into claims. Given the high cost of many consumer smart home devices and the marginal utility of, for example, an expensive leak detection system, it seemed unreasonable that an insurer would pay for and install such real-time trackers as part of issuing a policy.
Instead, consumers mostly get discounts on their premiums if they pay for and install such gear, much like consumers get discounts on their home insurance when they install a security system. Only in automotive have we seen some innovation, with companies such as State Farm and Progressive using personalized driving data to establish premiums. A few have even offered mile-by-mile insurance based on real-time driving.
Kinetic and Nationwide are flipping the model a bit. Implementation of the Kinetic device isn't supposed to be punitive for workers; rather, it's designed to draw attention to bad habits so that workers can correct them before they cause injury. The policy will remain active as long as 85% of a company's workforce uses the device.
Haytham Elhawary, the CEO of Kinetic, said he was inspired to create the device because his mom was a nurse, so he was well aware of the toll that a work injury can take on a family. "These workers get injured a lot," said Elhawary. "It's almost like you're asking them to work like they're an athlete, but you give them very little training." He built Kinetic to provide that training while workers are on the job.
When workers first start using the device, which is worn on their belts or waistband, they get vibrations for about a tenth of their poor movements so as to help train them slowly, building the necessary muscles and muscle memory to perform each movement correctly. Their progress also generates points or other gamified elements to keep them engaged and motivated to continually improve.
The devices were trained on some 200 people of varying sizes, each of whom work different types of jobs, to ensure that they track data accurately across a variety of body shapes and movement ranges. Those 200 people wore full-body sensor suits to help develop the algorithms that correlate to the correct movements measured at the waist, according to Elhawary.
On first hearing about the device, my biggest fear was that it might be used to push people to work faster and deliver more, which is a pretty common theme with warehouse workers and technology. But Elhawary said that in fact, it can show managers where they are asking too much of employees. And employees can use the data to demonstrate to management patterns in the environment that lead to motions that can cause injury.
Since launching the wearable in 2017, Kinetic had leased it out, but with the insurance plan Elhawary saw an opportunity to expand the business to new customers. Early customers were all self-insured, and tended to purchase the device because they were concerned about worker safety or saw reductions in their insurance costs. But companies that had outside insurers didn't see a reason to buy the wearable because they didn't see high costs associated with worker injuries.
"We thought if we want to get this device out there we have to provide the insurance," said Elhawary. But then, he said, "We realized we were selling [our customers] the wrong product. We needed to give them the devices for free and sell the insurance."
With this plan, Kinetic gains access to a larger market, and insurance firms get a new example of how IoT will radically change their business. |
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| The unbearable fussiness of the smart home |
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As we head into another gifting season and more and more connected devices make their way onto gift guides, I want to offer a cautionary note. The smart home is like a cat — mostly self-sufficient and nice to have, but also possessing a mind of its own that can lead to frustration and confusion for its owner. Indeed, when you gift or get a connected device, ownership turns into active participation with the device and various other ecosystems.
What do I mean? Three weeks ago, three of my devices stopped working — all for different reasons — and required different steps to fix them. This week, one device suddenly start working again, another connected after some initial struggles, and a third became so intrusive I had to move it to another room. |
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| — Google says WeMo is unavailable, and yet it still turns on my WeMo outlets. Image courtesy of S. Higginbotham. |
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This isn't a device or brand problem. It's an industry problem. Smart home products look like hardware but are really software, subject to updates and changes that will break integrations, contain bugs, and add new, unwanted features. For most consumers, there's a gap between what they expect from hardware and what they get with smart home devices that leads to dissatisfaction, returns, and poor user experiences.
For the manufacturers, there's a lack of tools and/or research to ensure that software updates don't cause problems or that new features don't frustrate users. I'll offer up a few examples of fussy devices to illustrate these issues. Let me be your cautionary tale before purchasing a smart bulb or speaker.
I'll start with a feature set shift that has led me to banish my Echo to the storage room. Amazon is one of the biggest players in this sector, introducing tens of smart home products a year and holding a leadership position with its Alexa digital assistant. But in the last month, Alexa has become so chatty — offering me a stream of recommendations, notifications, and discovery tips — that I finally put my Echo in the storage room.
I have complained about Alexa getting too proactive before, and had turned off as many of the options that led it to make suggestions in my Alexa app (here's how to do that), but she just kept talking to me. In the last three weeks, Google has made one unsolicited suggestion while Alexa has made at least five. Two of these were emergency alerts for slow-onset flooding in my area, which I had to go in and turn off.
I didn't even know Alexa tracked minor National Weather Service bulletins and alerted customers, much less when that feature was added. And it's frustrating to have a device behave differently without foreknowledge, especially if the new function interrupts me with non-essential information while I'm working or reading.
Another disappointment has been my Nanoleaf Elements, which are actually one of my favorite products. I had long had them on a schedule where they would turn on at 7:30 in the morning and off at 9:30 at night. About a month ago, I noticed they would turn off randomly during the day, so I checked the schedule in the app to make sure it was still correct. It was.
Then about three weeks ago, the lights started turning on in the middle of the night, waking us up. It was like living with a ghost. We finally started unplugging them at night to avoid the random wake-up calls. At that point, I tried changing the schedule, then I hard reset the device. My husband was frustrated with me. I was frustrated with Nanoleaf. The devices stayed unplugged.
Then I got a software update and applied it. The random schedule deviations stopped, but a day later I saw I had the option to update the lights to work as a Thread Border router. Excited, I applied the update. And then my lights stopped working. Nanoleaf suggested another hard reset and said an upcoming software update should fix the issue. It has been a week, however, and they are still broken.
Software updates break devices all the time. But in this case, there's a lack of communication and an element of surprise associated with a product that costs a lot of money (my Nanoleaf setup cost almost $1,000) as well as an element of random misbehavior that the consumer can't fix and for which they can't find answers. In this case, forums, maybe a Discord channel, and the ability to roll back bad software updates would probably help consumers feel a bit more informed and in control of their homes.
My final example of fussy devices addresses the challenges of making a device work within an ecosystem. I have two WeMo outlets powering lights over my plants that are tied into my Google Home ecosystem. They're scheduled to turn on at 8 a.m. and off at 8 p.m. in the Google Home routines setting as well as grouped to turn on or off when I tell Google to "Turn the plants on" or "Turn the plants off." Sometimes this works. Sometimes it doesn't. And sometimes it will tell me it doesn't work, via notification or voice, when in fact it's working just fine.
Just for kicks, the last time it stopped working, I decided not to fix it. In all honesty, I was just sick of messing with it, so I procrastinated and manually clicked the outlets on and off at approximately the right times. This approach enraged my husband, who kept asking Google to turn on the lights and kept getting error messages and no light.
But this morning it started working again. Sort of. The schedule is now turning on my lights on time and my requests to Google turn the lights on or off work. But...Google is also still sending me notifications to both the display and my phone informing me that there is a problem. Why? I don't know. Why did it stop working for two weeks and then suddenly start up again with no input from me? I don't know.
Usually when my WeMo outlets misbehave I factory reset them, delete them from the Google Home, and then set everything up again. It takes about 15-20 minutes and isn't hard, but it's also not something I love doing. But this time I just waited and it fixed itself. Or maybe it didn't?
I used to spend about two hours a week tweaking elements of my smart home, in part because I was constantly changing out devices and running multiple networks that were talking to different hubs. I have streamlined my home's devices and yet I still spend anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes a week dealing with devices that suddenly change their behavior or refuse to act like they are supposed to. It's like living with annoying, high-maintenance ghosts. Or a cat.
I'm not calling out Amazon, Nanoleaf, WeMo, or Google because their devices are bad; there are plenty of other brands that have provided similar trouble. But I do think it's worth warning people before they find themselves in too deep. The industry has come a long way, but in the end, owning a smart home still involves a lot of time spent doing the equivalent of herding cats. |
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| Episode 347: McKinsey reevaluates IoT’s impact |
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This week’s show has a lot of big numbers starting with $12.6 trillion, which is at the upper end of what McKinsey believes the economic impact from IoT will be by 2030. We cover the latest report, which is a reassessment of McKinsey’s famous 2015 report on the IoT that said it would be worth $11 trillion by 2015. That didn’t quite pan out. We also discuss Qualcomm’s plans for the IoT business to generate $9 billion in revenue by 2024. Still on the chip front, we cover additional delays in the ARM-Nvidia deal before discussing a weird Apple patent, and Apple losing its head of home services. Amazon also has news with brand new, cheap smart light switches for as low as $18.99 and an update for the latest Echo speakers and Echo Dots that lets them detect occupancy using ultrasound. We then talk about a dupe for the Nanoleaf lights available from Yeelight, a Xiaomi company, and Kevin shares his thoughts on a helpful app for HomeKit users that’s worth paying for.
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| — The Yeelight panels are dupes for the original Nanoleaf panels, but are half the cost at $97.99. Image courtesy of Yeelight. |
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Our guest this week is Jen Caltrider, lead on Mozilla’s *Privacy Not Included list of creepy and not-so-creepy connected devices and apps. This year’s list was the largest ever with 147 services and devices, and I was actually surprised by how much improvement there has been in some of the security and data practices. Caltrider shares the methodology, particularly egregious devices, and where we seem to be heading on the security and privacy front. We also get advice for consumers that still want to buy these gadgets and recommendations for the companies making them. I was excited to see that list was compiled by a person who loves gadgets as much as I do, but who is still concerned about the impacts poorly secured products or lackluster data policies have on trust.
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This week on the IoT Podcast Hotline, we answer a listener question about how to find a HomeKit-compatible method of connecting light strips to a sensor.
The IoT Podcast Hotline is brought to you by Very. Very is a fully distributed IoT engineering firm that partners with clients to build systems for smart manufacturing, smart energy and utilities, consumer electronics, and connected wellness. Discover what our multidisciplinary teams can do at https://www.verypossible.com/services. |
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| Check out an advanced HomeKit app that's pretty useful |
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| — Kevin recently tried the Controller for HomeKit app, which provides a lot of advanced features for users of Apple's smart home ecosystem. The app has a free and a paid version and adds features like storing QR codes, letting users see all of their cameras on one screen, letting users control more aspects of a device, and much more. To find out all of the things Kevin used it for, check out his review. |
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| News of the Week |
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Samsung SmartThings adds whole-home energy monitoring: It seems like there’s a gold rush of sorts going on in electricity monitoring. The latest prospector is Samsung SmartThings, which this week announced three new partnerships to bring whole-home energy monitoring to customers. The company says products and services from Copper Labs, Eyedro, and Wattbuy are now integrated with the SmartThings platform to let smart home owners track their electric usage and select renewable power suppliers. While this is a good start, it doesn’t allow SmartThings to view energy consumption at the individual device level. I suspect we’ll see that feature added over time through other products and services, however. (Samsung SmartThings) — Kevin C. Tofel
Pick up your Starbucks and just Go: Amazon’s “walk in and walk out to pay” strategy has another test company. This week, Starbucks announced it was trialing the Amazon Go payment system in a New York City location. Customers can order their food and beverages through the Starbucks app, then arrive at the location and scan a code from their Amazon Shopping app to enter the store. While there, they can also have other items automatically added to their bill thanks to the Amazon Go system, which consists of in-store cameras. And when they leave, the charges are automatically applied to their credit card. Maybe I’m just low on caffeine today, but I’m still not sold on a surveillance-style model for shopping and payments, no matter how convenient. (Starbucks) — Kevin C. Tofel
MediaTek is bringing Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2 to the IoT: You may not be familiar with MediaTek, but it has quickly dethroned Qualcomm as the global leader in smartphone chips. It has its hands in IoT, too. This week, the company announced a pair of new chips that will bring Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2 to IoT devices. These aren’t for battery-powered sensors, though. Expect to see the new silicon and improved wireless technology supporting both 2.4 and 5 GHz signals in larger products that are plugged in, such as webcams and smart speakers. Indeed, the new silicon supports voice assistants and always-on voice detection. Personally, I’d be happier to see them in the webcam segment, which still has new products using the 2.4 GHz bands that don’t play nicely with many mesh networks. (ArsTechnica) — Kevin C. Tofel
Alexa’s Conversation Mode is here and it's complex: After announcing it last year, Alexa’s Conversation Mode is now rolling out on the Echo Show 10. If you have this smart speaker you might not see (or hear) any changes right away, as the software update to enable it is following a several-week rollout. Once your Echo is updated, however, you can add Alexa to a conversation by saying the wake word a single time. Then, you and multiple people can have a discussion with Amazon’s smart speaker to ask multiple queries, control devices, or just talk about your day, I suppose. After your chat is over, saying “Leave this conversation” puts Alexa back into the standard wake-word mode. Although this sounds like a simple feature to add, there’s quite a bit of engineering involved using multiple sensors and a convoluted neural network, which this story explains for the nerds like me. (Amazon) — Kevin C. Tofel
Bsquare moves from consulting to a SaaS model with an IoT platform: If last week's Oracle study is to be believed, then the industrial and enterprise world is much more accepting of IoT platforms built as a service as opposed to custom-based implementation. Seeing this trend, and needing to change its business model, Bsquare, a consulting-focused IoT services firm, has released SquareOne, a product designed to manage hundreds of thousands of connected devices through software and a cloud. The SquareOne platform works across Android, Windows. Linux and embedded devices, which lets customers control and manage the wide array of connected devices in their deployment. (Bsquare) — Stacey Higginbotham
Is wireless charging in the smart home coming soon? This is worth watching. Ossia, a wireless power company located near me in the Seattle area, has signed a deal with Archos, a maker of tablets, smartphones, and air purifiers to install OSsia's over-the-air wireless charging technology in an upcoming line of smart home devices and wearables. This style of charging is different from the Qi standard that requires a person to put their phone on an approved charging pad. Ossia maintains it can charge devices nearby simply by sending power through the air. This has been theoretically possible for a while, but the people in the middle would get fried. Ossia says its solution doesn't hurt, and the story provides an explanation of the tech. The devices are expected next year, so I look forward to testing this out to see how much power this delivers and where we can best use it. (Ars Technica) — Stacey Higginbotham
Our industrial security is still pretty bad: This report reads mostly as a resume for Claroty's bug-finding expertise, but it also showcases some worrying trends in the world of OT vulnerabilities. Such as the stat that 71 percent of the vulnerabilities Claroty's researchers found were network vulnerabilities that could be triggered remotely. It also talks about ways to address the slow pace of industrial patching. (Claroty) — Stacey Higginbotham
Golioth's hardware-focused IoT cloud is now generally available: A little over a year ago I profiled Golioth, a cloud designed for people building hardware. The idea is that most cloud engineers don't take hardware needs in mind when designing integrations between hardware and their clouds, which can force hardware engineers to compromise on their designs. For a company that plans to sell a million devices, this sort of compromise can be costly in terms of the bill of materials or even force compromises with radios and battery life. Golioth wants to put hardware first and has launched its GA with support for more than 100 hardware components and the Zephyr real-time operating system. (Golioth) — Stacey Higginbotham
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