CES 2023: Health Tech, Smart Mixers and Edge AI

Article By : Nitin Dahad

The AspenCore staff discuss the media day at CES 2023.

CES 2023 opened as usual Tuesday with a media-only event offering a peek at some of the consumer electronics that throngs of other visitors to Las Vegas will see when the show opens today.

Some of the themes center around key trends that have emerged over the last couple of years, with many more products addressing these trends at various stages of development and commercialization.

Of the companies EETimes.com interviewed for this video, we noticed a much stronger presence than usual of established French technology companies, as well as startups. We spoke with executives and technologists at companies developing health tech products, plus others evolving edge-intelligence and RF-communication technology to new levels. Smart devices were in abundance, too, and we highlight a smart mixer in this video.

Another key theme of this year’s show is how to make technologies address the sustainability agenda. Thus, products using energy harvesting, such as a health tracker that doesn’t require charging, are also on display.

Watch the video below to hear more about CES 2023 Unveiled

Featured in this video:

• Baracoda Labs (Blabs): Health tracker using energy harvesting

• Dracula Technologies: Organic photovoltaic tech to generate energy from indoor light

• Dolphin Design: AI-based vision at sub-mW level

• PROES: RF transceiver with significantly more range without increasing bandwidth

• Wisear: A non-intrusive neural interface

• Femtosense: A sparse AI solution for real-time edge

• GE Appliances: A smart mixer.

Baracoda Labs (Blabs)

Baracoda Labs, or Blabs, is an incubator focused on health tech. One of its health tech startups at this year’s CES media-only event was the BHeart health tracker. It uses energy harvesting to do away with the need to recharge the batteries in the device. BHeart is created with sustainability in mind—not only its energy-autonomous design, but also the selection of plastic-free materials used in its manufacturing. Hear what Arthur Eberhardt, who leads hardware innovation, says about the tracker.

Dracula Technologies

Dracula Technologies developed an organic photovoltaic (OPV) solution to generate energy from indoor light, eliminating the need for batteries. Asserting that it is a pioneer in harvesting energy from indoor light, the team showcased several devices at CES. The company’s fast method for depositing thin films enables not only rapid prototyping, but also quick scaling in production capacity anywhere in the world, according to the company. CEO Brice Cruchon, CTO Sadok Ben Dkhil and Jerome Vernet, a sales VP, gather to tell us more about what they are doing.

Dolphin Design

At CES, Dolphin Design (a subsidiary of Soitec) and Neovision teamed up to build CamCube, a device-like demonstrator enabling AI-based vision applications at sub-mW level. The first concrete materialization of the partnership between the companies is a gesture-recognition AI application running on a battery-operated camera device demonstrator within sub-mW power budget. The camera device uses Dolphin Design’s silicon IP design platform, Raptor (the company’s ultra-low power edge AI accelerator IP), and runs Neovision’s high-performance and compact machine learning models. We interview CTO Vincent Huard.

PROES

PROES is French startup that said it offers an innovative RF technology to improve the quality and reliability of radio-frequency communication links. With the sensitivity improvement it delivers in the RF receiver, PROES tech enhances the RF range significantly compared with other protocols, such as LoRa, without the need to increase bandwidth. We speak with CEO Saba Homami, one of the firm’s co-founders.

Wisear

The leaders of Wisear are driven by a vision that, by 2028, most everyday devices will be equipped with biosensing solutions. So, they have been working on a neural-interface solution that can be implemented in any device to read, process, and interpret bio-electrical activity. They claim it’s the next step in the human-machine interface: First we had touch, then voice. Next will be non-invasive neural. Listen to what the firm’s co-founders, CEO Yacine Achiakh and CTO Alain Sirois, have to say.

Femtosense

Femtosense evolved from the “brains in silicon” work at Stanford University to develop what its leaders claim is a sparse-AI solution for the real-time edge—built on its sparse processing unit. At CES, the company was using a noise-cancellation demo to show its effectiveness for audio and speech, as CEO Sam Fok explains in the video.

GE Appliances

GE Appliances put on display what its promoters said is the smartest mixer in the United States to give customers the confidence to “mix, whip, cream and emulsify to perfection every time.” The connected, smart mixer includes a built-in smart scale (using load sensors) to precisely weigh ingredients directly in the mixing bowl so that bakers can ensure exact measurements without the need for extra equipment. Additionally, its auto-sense technology actively monitors changes in texture and viscosity through motor-torque feedback to optimize mixing performance. The goal is to avoid overmixing and undermixing. Hear more from Andre Zdanow, executive director of small appliances for GE Appliances.

 

This article was originally published on EE Times.

Nitin Dahad is the Editor-in-Chief of embedded.com, and a correspondent for EE Times, and EE Times Europe. Since starting his career in the electronics industry in 1985, he’s had many different roles: from engineer to journalist, and from entrepreneur to startup mentor and government advisor. He was part of the startup team that launched 32-bit microprocessor company ARC International in the US in the late 1990s and took it public, and co-founder of The Chilli, which influenced much of the tech startup scene in the early 2000s. He’s also worked with many of the big names—including National Semiconductor, GEC Plessey Semiconductors, Dialog Semiconductor and Marconi Instruments.

 

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