Nearables Just Got Nearer
Not too long ago, we started hearing a lot about wearables—devices that could be worn to serve a variety of fitness, health, and entertainment interests and needs. Recently a new term—nearables—has been popping up all over the place. The Internet of Things is another piece of jargon that has been gaining momentum during the past couple of years, and nearables may ultimately find their place under the Internet of Things umbrella.
Nearables work based on the concept of proximity or nearness, allowing two communication media to talk to each other. Imagine stickers that you can use for specific purposes that will then connect with other communication mediums, such as smartphones. Imagine it detects a meeting on your calendar for nine a.m., senses that current traffic will take you an hour to get to work, and then gives you a wakeup call through your alarm at seven a.m. And imagine all of this works in an unattended mode where you have not provided any instructions.
When you think about the options this beacon-like technology could offer, the potential downsides and challenges should not be ignored. To fully benefit from nearables, users need to be disciplined. You can imagine the frustration of being woken up at seven a.m. for a meeting that is not going to happen—all because the user's calendar is not in sync.
The success of nearables will depend on the quality of the other applications it interacts with and relies on to give users a good experience. Also, nearables at this time are flimsy stickers. How durable they will be in the long run and how secure they will be if they end up in the wrong hands are unknown at this time.
Though not a direct part of the Near Field Communication (NFC) umbrella, nearables are not too disparate from NFC-powered technology. While NFC has been getting a lot of attention and there is room for a lot of players, this space will soon get competitive and follow the survival of the fittest principle. Ambient backscatter, which is not necessarily NFC, has also been making positive strides and can be compared to what nearables are trying to achieve.
if you, as a developer, are curious to try these stickers for your app development, they are available. For the rest of us, this is an exciting development to watch for in the future.
