Connection goes skin deep!

Smartphones: the ideal connected companions

Connected objects are often represented as driving change in our everyday life. Yet other devices play a major and complementary role in this revolution, particularly the smartphone. The centerpiece of connected life, the smartphone is the preferred device for controlling communicating objects, and for collecting and delivering their data.

• Its processing power enables it to handle the information received and present it in a way that is manageable for the user (video, graphics, messages, etc.), and to control various connected objects.
• It can adapt to new sources of data, and to new requirements, just by adding a new easy-to-use application.
• Smartphone ownership is high and continually growing. In 2014, 145.8 million smartphones were delivered in Western Europe, according to an IDC study. On the French market alone, 18.2 million smartphones were sold in 2014. And tablets can depend on those same advantages too.

Constant monitoring with wearables

 In the retail market, connected bracelets were among the first connected objects to meet with success. That success will not be slackening, according to forecasts: the wearables market should increase 14-fold by 2018.
At present, their main applications lie in health and well-being. Christian Warocquier, research Project Leader at Orange Labs, deciphers this trend: “In the extremely individualized Internet world, everybody wants to boost their ability to manage themselves, to be independent and very much in control. These connected objects, linked to self-knowledge, to the ‘quantified self’, i.e. to self-measurement, fulfil this expectation”.
Users understand and value this role. “It is this kind of application with an immediately visible and understandable benefit that will ensure connected objects are adopted and accepted for new uses, or in new forms”, explains the Orange Labs research Project Leader.
This should take on a whole other dimension with a new generation of wearables that will not just be ‘worn’, but placed directly onto the skin in the form of patches or even set under the skin.

Objects that extend intelligence

Whether in health, safety, transport, industry, logistics, and so on, in the future connected objects will integrate into many fields and correspond to other uses not yet envisaged.

“Every hassle or nuisance in life will bring about the development of a connected object to provide a solution. It will augment the physical world with a layer of distributed intelligence, delegated by humans’”, believes Christian Warocquier. “It really is delegated intelligence, transferred onto the machine. The machine can certainly take on the repetitive tasks, such as checking, and then alert the person and call on their intelligence when action is required’”.