Revisiting Personal Area Networks

The idea of Personal Area Networks (PAN) has been trickling around the hardware universe for years, but has always proved elusive. Recent advances may actually mean we can start to see PANs become a reality, and through them make for consumer electronics devices that are exciting again.

Personal area networks are the idea that individuals can carry a constellation of devices which are connected, and enhance our interactions with data. Typically, this is envisioned as a set of wearables all connecting to our phones and through that to the wider Internet. We already have some fairly rudimentary versions of PANs – a phone, bluetooth ear buds, a fitness watch – but this only scratches the surface of what people have in mind. This could include a whole set of peripherals – portable keyboards, foldable screens, network adapters – as well as a wider array of sensors to monitor bio signals beyond the limited functionality of today, including sensors implanted into our bodies. PANs could be used as security and authentication devices. And of course the current holy grail of so many companies augmented reality (AR) glasses which can overlay visual data on top of our natural vision. Go down this rabbit hole and all kinds of compelling ideas emerge.

Given this vast realm of possibilities why have PANs never really advanced beyond the limited capacity we see in our Fitbits and AirPods today? The answer is technology’s perennial buzz kill – power. Each of those devices has a limited power budget, and all the radios connecting them demand a significant portion of those budgets. Even using energy optimized technologies like Bluetooth Low Energy is power expensive. Also, some of the attached devices might require meaningful amounts of computing power. Today those are beyond the capabilities of most solutions, rendering them impossible to build.

Fortunately, there seem to be a number of developments which may allow us to push the frontier of the possible. First, we are seeing a sea change in the development of sensors. Soon, we will be able to run sensors with orders of magnitude lower power requirements. These advances are driven in part by applying the latest tools from semiconductor manufacturing in non-traditional ways. In addition, we know a number of companies which have unlocked pure research and are exploring ways to commercialize them. There is a growing array of start-ups bringing new sensors to the market which offer considerable promise.

Another important advance is in the field of new wireless technologies including wireless power and entirely new approaches to data transmission.

One of our favorites in this space is Ixana which uses the natural conductivity of the human body as a conduit for sending signals. This sounds like science fiction, but we have seen working demos of their product, and we know they have made significant advances since then. It is easy to underestimate the importance of what they could potentially bring to the table. They claim that they are 100 times more power efficient than Bluetooth. Two orders of magnitude is a huge change and could allow product designers to completely redraw their power budgets opening up the door to PANs in a way we have not seen for a very long time. This is one of our most anticipated meetings of CES.

It has been a long time since we have been excited by consumer electronics. Phones have all looked the same for over ten years, with advances limited to ever better cameras or more “AI”. Today it is still hard to see that changing, but our sense is that the pieces are starting to fall into place for some significant advances.. Individually these are all interesting enough, but taken together they start to spark a ray of hope in an otherwise boring consumer electronics landscape.