CES 2015: Sensors Add New Dimensions to Consumer Electronics

With laptops and PCs losing market share to handhelds and wearables, sensors are taking on a growing role in consumer electronics.

At the recent 2015 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), manufacturers rolled out health and fitness monitors, touchscreens, smart toothbrushes, gesture recognition systems, and other products equipped with newer, more powerful sensor technologies.

The driving force, engineers say, is the growing consumer hunger for greater intelligence and smaller size. Smart products communicate to the outside world, and need sensors to do so. And compact products are more likely to incorporate enhanced sensing technologies, such as touchscreens.

"You don't see a lot of touchscreens in laptops," said Rick Popovits, LTS product marketing manager for Synaptics, which makes human interfaces for the electronics industry. "That's primarily because the cost can be $2 to $3 per diagonal inch, which is too high for laptop displays. But in smaller products, they make sense."

At CES, Synaptics showed off a touchscreen that allows users to employ any kind of conductive stylus, such as a ballpoint pen or even a pencil. The technology is a departure from conventional capacitive touchscreens, which typically require that users employ either an electronic "active" stylus, or a conductive "passive" stylus with a broad tip. Synaptics' new technology will enable users to communicate with their handheld devices in a convenient and inexpensive way, enabling touchscreens to make inroads in even more handheld devices.

The ability to make such advances is inextricably linked to more powerful electronics around the sensors. Microcontrollers and digital signal processors (DSPs) need to crunch more data in order to run bigger and smarter software programs. "Our newest generation of touch controllers need twice the MIPs (millions of instructions per second) of our previous generation to enable us to use the more advanced algorithms," Popovits said. "So we need firmware engineers, hardware engineers, software engineers, and even materials engineers to work within our sensor eco-systems."

Such advances extend beyond touchscreens. At Texas Instruments (TI), engineers showed off analog front ends (AFE4403 and AFE4404) for use in wristwatch-style health monitors. The new monitors use optical sensing to measure the heart rate of athletes while they exercise. The AFEs -- which include integrated analog-to-digital converters, as well as receivers and LED-based transmitters -- enable the devices to optically monitor pulse or blood oxygenation by passing light through the user's wrist. "People have been trying to solve this problem for 50 years," noted Lijoy Phillipose, an applications manager at TI. "The problem is, you can't solve it with just an electrical engineer. You need optical engineers, biomedical engineers, DSP engineers, and mechanical engineers, too."

For consumers, the result is more convenience. In the past, amateur athletes could monitor their heart rates with elastic bands worn around the chest, or with wristwatches that required the use of two hands, or with wired systems. "No one wants a wired device hooked up to them," Phillipose told us. "They want to be free to move."

At CES, the sheer volume of new sensor-based products was stunning. InBody Co. Ltd., for example, demonstrated a wristwatch-sized device that uses an impedance sensor to measure percent body fat, heart rate, steps, exercise time, and distance traveled. With a 3D accelerometer, it can even measure activity during sleep. Another startup, Switzerland-based Vigilant, showed off the Rainbow Junior, a toothbrush endowed with a gyroscope to help kids learn to brush their teeth properly.

Similarly, many companies demonstrated sensor-based technologies for competitive athletes. Tokyo-based Cerevo, for example, showed off its XON Snow-1bindings, which incorporate an accelerometer and load sensors to help winter athletes improve their snowboarding. For basketball players, InfoMotion Sports Technologies displayed its 94Fifty basketball, which uses nine sensors (including accelerometers, gyroscopes, and a magnetometer) to measure the arc and backspin on a shot. And MyVert demonstrated a device the size of a business card that uses an accelerometer, gyroscope, and proprietary software algorithm to measure the vertical jump of athletes. "All you need to do is jump, and 53 calculations later our algorithm will tell you how high you went off the floor," Martin Matak, the company's founder, told Design News.

In virtually all cases, products at the show focused on simplicity. MyVert, for example, eliminates large stationary equipment that's typically used to measure vertical jumping ability. Similarly, the InBody Band eliminates the need for calipers and total body scans to determine body composition. And the new generation of heart rate monitors offers a simple way for users to understand the human heart's most vital information.

For suppliers, the next step is to reduce the cost of future sensor systems. Already, Synaptics is working on new ways to eliminate the sensing substrates atop its touchscreens, and replace them with circuitry that's integrated directly into the display surface. The company hopes the effort will yield bigger, cheaper, touch technologies.

"At some point, it becomes all about reducing the cost at the system level," said Popovits of Synaptics. "Then we can have even broader adoption across more products."

Design engineers and professionals, the West Coast's most important design, innovation, and manufacturing event, Pacific Design & Manufacturing, is taking place in Anaheim, Feb. 10-12, 2015. A Design News event, Pacific Design & Manufacturing is your chance to meet qualified suppliers, get hands-on access to the latest technologies, be informed from a world-class conference program, and expand your network. (You might even meet a Design News editor.) Learn more about Pacific Design & Manufacturing here.

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