Delivering in-depth analysis of fitness and performance levels to amateur and professional athletes on the run. Sending alerts and precise locations of potentially dangerous incidents to emergency contacts who can respond accordingly. Providing medical grade assessments of an individual’s health concerns without a health practitioner in sight. These are just some of the many scenarios in which near ubiquitous wireless tech is making everyday life simpler, safer, and healthier for billions. And as ambitious developers take advantage of evolving technologies, connected devices with smaller form factors will do even more using even less power.

An inflection point in the remarkable rise of wireless innovation can be traced back a quarter of a century to the emergence of an interoperable protocol that formed a standard, alongside an open specification for hardware and software. That technology came to be known as Bluetooth, which in its various forms has powered a significant segment of the connected world ever since. Within two years of Ericsson, Nokia, Intel, IBM and Toshiba creating the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) in May 1998, the Bluetooth 1.0 Specification had been launched and the first Bluetooth cellphone and wireless headset developed. From there the rate of adoption accelerated impressively. The Bluetooth SIG’s membership skyrocketed and last year over 5 billion Bluetooth-enabled devices were shipped worldwide—a figure expected to climb to 7 billion by 2026.

Today, wearables are universal, while smart homes, smart industries and even smart cities are transforming life on ‘Planet Bluetooth’. The release of the standard drove impressive growth, but things really got going with the release of an energy efficient version, Bluetooth LE, in 2010 as a hallmark element of the Bluetooth 4.0 Specification. Bluetooth LE was born out of a 2001 Nokia venture to develop a wireless technology which would operate from coin cell batteries and allow peripherals such as heart rate monitors to connect to the Finnish company’s handsets. It was further developed with partners including Nordic Semiconductor—a company that was already a renowned pioneer in ultra-low power, high performance wireless connectivity. Nordic’s technology enabled, among other applications, a heart rate belt to wirelessly connect to a Nokia phone. Nokia’s initiative was eventually released to the public in October 2006 under the brand name Wibree—and it soon attracted the attention of the Bluetooth SIG.

Crucially, although it was a leader in proprietary wireless tech, Nordic took the decision to back the open standard—just as it has with cellular IoT, DECT NR+ and Wi-Fi in more recent times—ceding much of its hard-won intellectual property (IP) to the Bluetooth SIG. It proved a masterstroke; the low power wireless market exploded, with Nordic’s share making it a global market leader. Bluetooth LE was a game changer because its ultra-low power consumption meant data could be gathered from sensors without requiring frequent battery recharge or replacement. And because handset makers were familiar with the original Bluetooth tech, they rapidly adopted the low power version in their new models. That was the catalyst for a huge market in ‘appcessories’, wirelessly linked peripheral devices such as fitness bands that leveraged the smartphone’s computational horsepower. Today’s high-end wearables represent just the latest chapter of this story.

The Rise and Rise of Bluetooth

The expansion of Planet Bluetooth has been built on both constant enhancements to the Bluetooth Core Specification—the technical name for the document that details how to build Bluetooth devices—and the powerful Bluetooth SoCs with their associated application software that power increasingly sophisticated applications.

By: DocMemory
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