Posts

What do you want to achieve with AIOT?: To Optimize

,

“Improve your existing resources”

In a previous blog, we talked about how IoT can help in taking control. There is another step further: to optimize your processes with AIOT.

Benefits

  • Better use of existing resources
  • Take the right decisions at the right time
  • Optimal circumstances

Better use of existing resources

Control means you have a clear overview how assets are being used. Such as:

  • How long does each step in a process take?
  • What are the whereabouts of my assets (trucks, cranes, forklifts, containers…)?
  • What is the state of maintenance?

The next step is of course, to optimize your business.

First of all, many blogs write about total-new situations. In fact, most AIOT is needed in companies which are already established. With their inventory, processes, customers and all the responsibilities which come with them. Large investments have been made to reach the business today. And so, their processes may not be optimal, at least they work. So how to benefit from AIOT, without throwing away all these investments? And: how to be sure processes are at least working as they do know? Smart sensors help to bring the whole process at today’s level, without throwing away resources which are working fine. Besides, companies can choose to implement AIOT piecemeal.

This is especially the case when it’s about highly essential functions such as infrastructure, sluices and installations. Here, the asset is not just an asset, but a part of a total infrastructure. Downtime of such an asset has large implications for society as a whole.

Many processes are still monitored piecemeal. A further optimization is to connect systems with each other. Get 1 overview in 1 dashboard. Learn how your processes are doing, and where are the optimizations are required.

Take the right decisions at the right time

To measure is to know, to know is to be able to improve.

One most mentioned benefits of AIOT is preventive maintenance. Preventive maintenance means that something is repaired or replace, before it is breaks. Or at least, to maintain while the damage is still small. In normal situations there would be downtime, now repairs can be made scheduled. And if downtime is needed for repairs, then it can be scheduled at times the least inconvenient.

It’s already been said: to be able to schedule repairs. Take the right decisions at the right time. Besides, in the old situation, a foreman has to do his round, where he gives each machine the same attention. With AIOT, the quality of the assets can be guarded with sensors. So, at his round, a foreman can give most attention to the machines which mostly need it.

The same applies to a sector as biomedical: ‘to prevent is better then to cure’. So, help your clients and/or yourself to stay healthy. An example is fall detection. And does the elderly take his medicine?

Help your patients with therapy, to make use of knowledge from all previous patients: is therapy going on track? Also: give the patients who need it the right amount of attention. Instead of seeing all your patients with a standard scheduled time-frame, and as a consequence, give none of them enough time really.  If therapy is lagging, you probably want to give those patient attentions. Is therapy going faster then expected: what are the reasons? How can this knowledge be used to improve therapy in the future? Besides, if people can do therapy and appointments at home, they don’t have to spend their precious time; where the actual time needed for treatment is shorter then the time spent on travelling and waiting.

Optimal circumstances

Sensors can guard that product are made or kept in optimal circumstances. E.g., if cutting parts of a machine are still sharp enough, and in their right precision. Or guard the temperature of cooling or keep an eye on the indoor air quality. This may also make guarantees possible, and thus creating added value to your products or service.

/0 Comments/by

The roll-out to 5G: enabler for Industry 4.0

Since the end of July 2020, KPN has renewed its mobile network which enables 5G. KPN is rapidly expanding coverage throughout the Netherlands. Business customers and entrepreneurs can already make use of special 5G services. To see tomorrow’s digital highway in action, since 5G is one of the enablers for smart industry

3.5 GHz frequency auction

Starting in 2022, KPN will auction G5 frequencies. Meanwhile, together with customers and technology partners, telecom and ICT service provider KPN has launched 5G field labs to discover the value of 5G applications. Thanks in part to 5G technology, these types of applications will become a reality.

During the new 5G auction, frequencies in the 3.5 GHz band will be distributed. These will enable connections at much higher speeds. At the auction in the first quarter of 2022, at least three parties must obtain licenses for the frequencies. No single party may acquire more than 40 percent of the available frequencies, says the proposal for the course of the auction.

A total of 300 megahertz of bandwidth is to be distributed. This consists of three blocks of 60 megahertz and twelve blocks of 10 megahertz. The auction will be held in three phases. Prior to and during the auction the Ministry of Economic Affairs will not provide information about the total number of participants. At the end, the winning parties will be announced and the State Secretary will make the entire bidding process public.

Tomorrow’s digital highway

Thanks to the capacity and reliability of our network, new applications such as innovations in security, healthcare, mobility, logistics and the manufacturing industry become possible.  Unlike 4G, 5G is expected to become an ecosystem from which many business sectors, industries and areas can benefit. Innovations from which the whole of society benefits. In addition to higher speed, 5G focuses explicitly on flexibility in the network to support very short response times and higher reliability. This will enable a wide range of new applications for customers and industries.

5G is expected to provide a huge boost in business for augmented and virtual reality, robotics, drones, intelligent assets, wearables, AI-based video analytics and Internet of Things (IoT), among others.

In addition to 5G, Internet of Things also requires edge computing. This involves placing a small cloud with computing power, storage and network capacity at the edge of the network, as it were, close to applications, devices and users. Because data no longer has to travel all the way up and down to the cloud or a data center, time-critical applications such as self-driving cars and augmented reality become possible.

5G: enabler for Industry 4.0

5G is also a key enabler for Industry 4.0. This involves using Internet of Things, cloud computing and data integration, among other things, to make the production process fully computer-controlled and remote. The human thought process is thereby partially or completely taken over. Due to its high speed and reliability and short latency, 5G is essential within Industry 4.0 for, for example, controlling production lines, facilitating self-driving vehicles and connecting large numbers of IoT devices.

Field Labs

KPN Eindhoven 5G Fieldlab

The national rollout of 5G has only just started, but KPN has been testing 5G for useful applications in its Field Labs for some time. 

The 5G field lab for the manufacturing industry shows everyone which 5G indoor use cases are possible in a factory environment. Besides speed, 5G also enables larger reliability and very low network latency. A large number of wireless sensors also plays an important role in the further rollout of the IoT. Thus, the 5G Field Labs shows that 5G can be used for very different applications simultaneously.

/0 Comments/by

Sensors in Biomedical AIOT

,

Biomedical devices are at the forefront of AI and IOT (more often called AIOT). What is your most important reason to use sensors for biomedical devices?

Biomedical sensors for ai, iot and aiot to optimize

To control

  • Does the patient follow the medical instructions? Examples: is he doing his therapy on time and in the right way. Does he take his medications?  Especially groups of risk can be monitored so that timely action can be taken if necessary
  • Is treatment going well?  For both doctor and client alike. And even better:  You can optimize the healing process
  • Do medically devices still give the right measurement?
sensors biomedical devices optimize ai iot aiot

To optimize

  • Optimize your treatment: Compare the treatment results from your client with your other clients. And thus, find out point of improvement
  • Give attention for those who need it. Nobody wants to spend time unnecessary in a waiting room
  • Better use of existing resources
  • Connect systems with each other
  • Take the right decisions at the right time
  • Preventive maintenance Security

To innovate

  • Better serve your clients
  • Be at the forefront of medical developments
  • Track & trace
  • Create optimal circumstances with modern technology
sensors for biomedical devices iot ai aiot

To save

  • Give the client the best care
  • Spend your budget where most needed
  • To prevent is better than to cure
  • Prevent greater suffering, avoid extra high costs
  • Nobody is waiting for unnecessary treatment
  • Preventive maintenance on medical devices prevents higher repair costs and downtime
/0 Comments/by

AIoT optimised DSP filtering library for Arm, RISC-V and MIPS microcontrollers

,

ASN Filter Designer’s new ANSI C SDK framework, provides developers with a comprehensive automatic C code generator for microcontrollers and embedded platforms. This allows developers to directly deploy their AIoT filtering application from within the tool to any STM32, Arduino, ESP32, PIC32, Beagle Bone and other Arm, RISC-V, MIPS microcontrollers for direct use.

Arm’s CMSIS-DSP library vs. ASN’s C SDK Framework

Thanks to our close collaboration with Arm’s architecture team, our new ultra-compact, highly optimised ANSI C based framework provides outstanding performance compared to other commercial DSP libraries, including Arm’s optimised CMSIS-DSP library.

Benchmarks for STM32: M3, M4F and M7F microcontrollers running an 8th order IIR biquad lowpass filter for 1024 samples

As seen, using o1 complier optimisation, our framework is able to surpass Arm’s CMSIS-DSP library’s performance on an M4F and M7F. Although notice that performance of both libraries is worse on the Cortex-M3, as it doesn’t have an FPU. Despite the difference, both libraries perform equally well, but the ASN DSP library has the added advantage of extra functionality and being platform agnostic, making it ideal for variety of biomedical (ECG, EMG, PPG), audio (sound effects, equalisers) , IoT (temperature, gas, pressure) and I4.0 (flow measurement, vibration analysis, CbM) applications.

AIoT applications designed on the newer Cortex-M33F and Cortex-M55F cores can also take advantage of extra filtering blocks, double precision arithmetic support, providing a simple way of implementing high performance AI on the Edge applications within hours.

Advantages for developers

  • A developer can now develop, test and deploy a complete DSP filtering application within the ASN Filter Designer within a few hours. This is very different from a traditional R&D approach that assigns a team of developers for several days in order to achieve the same level of accuracy required for the application.
  • Open source and agnostic code base: In order to allow developers to get the maximum performance for their applications, the ASN-DSP SDK is provided as open source and is written in ANSI C. This means that any embedded processor and any level of compiler optimisation can be used.
  • Memory size required for the ASN-DSP SDK is relativity lower than other standard DSP libraries, which makes the ASN-DSP SDK extremely suitable for microcontrollers that have memory constrains.
  • Using the ASN Filter Designer’s signal analyser tool, developers now can test the performance, accuracy and assess the frequency response of their designed filter and get optimised C code which they can directly use in their application.
  • The SDK also supports some extra filtering functions, such as: a median filter, a moving average filter, all-pass, single section IIR filters, a TKEO biomedical filter, and various non-linear functions, including RMS, Abs, Log and Sqrt.  These functions form the filter cascade within the tool, and can be used to build signal processing applications, such as EMG and ECG biomedical applications.
  • The ASN-DSP SDK supports both single and double precision floating point arithmetic, providing excellent numerical accuracy and wide dynamic range. The library is unique in the sense that it supports double precision arithmetic, which although is not the most optimal for microcontrollers, allows for the implementation of high-fidelity filtering applications.

The ANSI C SDK framework is further extended by our new C# .NET framework, allowing .NET developers to build high performance desktop applications with signal processing capabilities.

Find out more and try it yourself

Benchmarks on a variety of 32-bit embedded platforms, including a biomedical EMG filtering example, are covered in the following application note.

The both framework SDKs are available in ASNFD v5.0, which may be downloaded here.

ASN Filter Designer box
Download Demo
Pricing and Licencing

/0 Comments/by