Wearable M2M

Last week I went into a rant because I had been doing some consulting about M2M with a friend who made everything about M2M sound like a social network.

We all do not have to be Neo in the Matrix talking to the machines, nor do I worry that we are building Terminator in the M2M space. The deployment of sensors in M2M are normally a better reporting tool for managing business intelligence by giving updates.

Often in my discussions this feels to me like Network Management 2.0 taking us to a finer degree of element management and thresholding.

And I do not think of this as being about people except for the equivalent of a Network Operations Center like function of management.

And then of course, my logic gets thrown away by something I see.

At CTIA I happened upon a company called WindTrac http://www.windtrac.us/index.htm. It's a typical M2M company with solutions that support fleet management, transportation, oil and gas and other applications. However, their products designed for Law Enforcement were an interesting adaptation.

In particular they have a body armor (I guess the term bullet proof vest is out of date) that has embedded sensors to know if an officer has been shot. They system is designed to report location from GPS as well. Called the ST100 Body Armor, I was impressed with the possibilities of support available to dispatchers as a result of such a solution.

Their dispatch systems also supports a gun sensor called the FG 100 Firearm Tracker. This system reports when the gun is drawn, the sound of incoming fire and the trajectory of bullets from the weapon itself. In effect it’s a blackbox for firearms.

These are devices that could be considered part of the augmented reality camp, however unlike augmented reality solutions that interact with the user, these systems report on the user. This is not going to be a Facebook page, an iPhone app or anything flashy, but it’s an effective M2M solution. The other thing that it does is it provides an objective augmentation of reality. The Gun was fired here and aimed there. The officer was wounded here. Reporting back for better support. It’s not Murphy of RoboCop but its something Murphy would probably want before he became RoboCop.