Bluetooth technology holds both power and prospect for a vast array of
industries. Analysts predict it will revolutionize the way devices interconnect
in the future and lead to a plethora of unique and useful business and consumer
applications. As this promising technology emerges into the forefront, the
question becomes—how can we use it?
Bluetooth, developed by Ericsson, is an open standard for
short-range wireless networking. It is designed to enable simple, spontaneous
connectivity among cell phones, laptops, PDAs, and other portable handheld (or
worn) devices—a simple alternative to the cables that connect devices and
peripherals over short distances. In Bluetooth Nirvana, an incoming fax is
routed automatically to the nearest printer; your laptop spontaneously uses a
nearby mobile phone to check e-mail; and your PDA acts as your user interface
to the nearest Automated Teller Machine.
So, obviously, Bluetooth will get rid of some wires. But
there's got to be more to it than losing wires. What will Bluetooth be used
for? Following are some suggested applications as short-range wireless
networking becomes cheap and ubiquitous (regardless of the
eventually-agreed-upon standard).
Wiring The Previously Unwired. A lot of
wires never got put into devices to begin with because a physical wire was
infeasible or too annoying for the value it provided. With Bluetooth, wires can
be added virtually. So what will be virtually wired? And will doing so lead to
more physical wires, as previously unpowered devices now equipped with
Bluetooth come to need power?
Cheap "Machine Vision." Simply
identifying Bluetooth-enabled devices would be of value. In an era of
location-based services and "uCommerce," the ability of devices to "see"
objects in their vicinity is critical to establishing the context of the
user—context that may be crucial to informing, personalizing and delivering
user services. From the remote service providers' perspective, these devices
could determine what usable tools are within 30 feet (Bluetooth's average
interactive range) of a user that can be used to deliver services, etc.
Bluetooth would then serve as a long-range RFID tagging system.
Activity Sensing & Auditing.
Devices might report what they're doing. Chemical factory workers equipped with
Bluetooth devices could passively log their proximity to various events at the
factory (e.g., mixing of reagents, a machine being cleaned, (un)loading
dangerous chemicals). Conference rooms might report their meeting schedules,
current occupants, meeting materials, etc. for current and future reference.
The activities of locations and their resources might be continuously
broadcast, enabling a variety of awareness applications (and eventually much
more fine-grained recall and auditing procedures).
Environmental Control. Bluetooth might
let locations tell a person's devices how to behave as they enter a space; for
example, a movie theater could automatically turn off the ringer of a patron's
Bluetooth-equipped phone as she enters the theater.
Distributed Sensing. Once we begin
treating these devices as sensors, we can begin thinking about distributed
awareness applications. Just as certain sensors (such as weather and traffic)
only really generate value when aggregated over large regions, perhaps we can
aggregate data from Bluetooth devices to get a sense of how product use varies,
and how the activities the Bluetooth products enable vary.
Simple Transactions. With Bluetooth,
simple routine transactions (checking into an office, restaurant or hotel;
pre-ordering and paying at Starbucks, etc.) can be enabled without requiring
access to a person or even a kiosk—resources that are inevitably limited. Do
you have ideas for innovative applications for Bluetooth or opinions about the
viability of the technology? Send us your ideas and we may share them with our
subscribers in the next issue of Accenture Access.
All of these applications focus on three primary assumptions
of Bluetooth: its limited range, its ubiquity and device profiles enabling
casual interaction. Most of them have low bandwidth requirements—which is not
to imply that Bluetooth's relatively generous bandwidth won't be used, but
simply that many applications won't need it.
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