Author: Ys

Ottomate Smart Fan: Not smart enough

Last month, I was invited to the Ottomate Smart Fan launch event in New Delhi, where I sat for what felt like an entire day listening to Vishal Sehgal, Ottomate’s Co-Founder and MD, wax poetic about the company’s first product. Sehgal, who is also the Co-Founder of Lava International (yes, the Indian smartphone brand), explained to me and a few other heavy-eyed journalists that there had been absolutely no innovation in the ceiling fan industry in the past fifty years. Running us through numerous slides, he presented the Ottomate Smart Fan, an advanced ceiling fan operated using a smartphone app.

Curious enough, I got in touch with the Ottomate team and asked for one to be installed in my bedroom. No more than a week later, an Ottomate personnel turned up at my doorstep with a couple of boxes, an installation kit, and a folding step ladder. As he went about installing the fan, he told me that I would need the Ottomate app to use it. As I reached for my iPhone, he said the app was available only on Android. Fortunately, I had an Android phone too, so before long I was able to create an account with Ottomate and register the product. And a little after that, what should I see pop up on the app but a firmware update—for my ceiling fan! Imagine my surprise.

Ottomate: How the system works

Before I tell you about my experience with the fan, let me explain to you how the whole Ottomate system works. The Gurgaon-based company aims to offer a whole range of “smart” consumer durables like ceiling fans, lights, and water heaters that are operable through the Ottomate smartphone app. The idea is that once these “smart” devices are all installed and connected to a smartphone, the user can then control them from any part of the house using the connected smartphone. In an ideal scenario, the user should be able to control the operation of a connected Ottomate device that’s in the first floor from the ground floor without having to get up. What’s more, an entire mesh of Ottomate devices can be connected through Bluetooth Low Energy and controlled using the same app. The primary user can add more users and guests.

In addition to creating “smart” durables, Ottomate wants to simplify the installation process of its devices. According to the company, the user needn’t go to the trouble of calling a local electrician to have their new device installed; once the user has purchased an Ottomate product, they need only download the Ottomate app on their Android phone, open it, and request an installation. They can then expect an Ottomate installation agent to visit their home and take care of the setup. Future service requests too can be made from the Ottomate app.

From the proposed range, the company’s first product is the Ottomate Smart Fan. Designed by Bangalore-based design studio Foley Designs, it looks no different from a regular ceiling fan at first glance but has a few tricks up its sleeve. Sitting next to the motor inside the central dome is a Qualcomm CSR1020 QFN chipset, which is considered the “brain” of the fan. It features a 16-bit processor, 80 kilobytes of RAM, 60 kilobytes of internal storage space for applications, Bluetooth 4.2, Bluetooth Low Energy, and CSRmesh. The fan also has an integrated temperature and humidity sensor made by STMicroelectronics. All this is what lets the fan talk to the Ottomate app on an Android smartphone. The fan can also be operated using a proprietary Ottomate remote control, which is an optional purchase.

Ottomate service engineer at work

Ottomate Smart Fan: My experience

With the installation of the new Ottomate Smart Fan all done, I sat around under the fan playing with the controls on the app. I explored all the speed options available. Unlike a regular ceiling fan, which is typically equipped with a four- or five-speed regulator, the Ottomate Smart Fan could be set to spin at any speed between 1 and 100 with the option of a Turbo Mode, which gave it an additional ten-percent boost after its top speed. There was a Breeze Mode, which varied the speed of the fan every few seconds to create the effect of a breeze. This, I felt, was a bit of a gimmick even though the fan made use of the internal temperature and humidity sensor to work. Of course, I can understand if there are users out there who might actually like such an effect. Lastly, there was an Otto Mode (auto mode, basically), which, as you can guess, set the speed of the fan automatically depending on the temperature and humidity. The Otto Mode predicted the right speed required quite well as far as I could tell.

I have been using the Ottomate Smart Fan for the last two or so weeks now. While my experience has been mostly pleasant during this time, I came across a few unmissable issues. The first is noise. The Ottomate Smart Fan installed in my bedroom is significantly louder than my previous Havells fan at any speed. This, I’m told by my colleague Shrey, could be the result of a bad installation. At any rate, the grinding noise from the Ottomate in the middle of the night—resembling an old fan from the 70s—vexes me enough to believe the Ottomate Smart Fan wasn’t designed smartly enough to run quietly.

The second issue is overall quality of execution. The Ottomate app, which is currently limited to Android users and has no integration with Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant, needs the user’s location at all times to run, something users concerned about privacy (like me) will not want to provide. On launching, the app loads (read: communicates with the fan) for some four to five seconds before letting me control the fan. Working the speed slider in the app can, at times, be a bother while setting a precise number. On pressing the back button, the app persistently asks if I really want to quit. All these niggles give me the impression that I’d have sooner operated the fan by getting up from my bed and reaching for the regulator on the wall. The lack of a bundled remote control only adds to my annoyance because, honestly, it would have still been faster than using the Ottomate app.

Ottomate app only available on Android for now

Summary: Smart but not smart enough

I think Ottomate is bold and ambitious in its quest to build a connected household but its first product already suffers from quality issues, especially in terms of execution. After a few weeks with the Ottomate Smart Fan, I’m left with the impression that it’s a noisy fan—noisier than the thirty-year-old Khaitan table fan my grandmother owns. It doesn’t help that at times, it takes longer to operate the fan through an Android smartphone than through a traditional regulator on the wall. In summary, the Ottomate Smart Fan is an advanced ceiling fan with the potential to be truly smart, but right now, is just trying too hard.

Your next major health problem could be predicted in advance

Back in May 2018, Owkin, a medical research machine learning startup, received $5 million in Series A follow-on funds from GV, Alphabet’s venture investment arm. For the uninitiated, Alphabet is the parent company of Google that was created when the organisation went through a massive restructuring back in 2015. Cut to 2019, in February, the US Patent and Trademark Office published a Google patent about a predictive EHR system. The patent was apparently filed back in 2017 and hasn’t been granted yet.

EHR

Before we explain why this is important, it is essential to know what EHR is. Electronic health records, or EHRs, are an organised collection of patient data that can be shared across different healthcare situations. In terms of the data stored, EHR may include a wide variety of markers like demographics, medical history, medication and allergies, immunization status, laboratory test results, radiology images, vital signs, personal statistics like age and weight, and billing information. Such a system allows doctors to access all of this information about a patient, new or old, as it is usually linked to identifiers such as social security numbers in the US. However, if technology based on the Google patent application came to be, their usefulness could go beyond that.

The patent

The Google patent in question intends to use EHR in multiple ways by subjecting it to machine learning. The massive amount of data in there definitely holds a lot of potential for many use cases. For instance, the first part will focus on aggregating such information from multiple sources and organisations. On the face of it, this is a huge task in itself because of how healthcare data can vary from organisation to organisation. As Google put it in a blog post dated back to May 2018, even something as basic as the temperature can have different meanings depending on where it was measured from – under the tongue, through your eardrum, or on your forehead. However, Google has defined its approach to this problem by applying a new model to track health records, built on top of the open Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard described earlier by them.

Data in a patient’s record is represented as a timeline. For illustrative purposes, different types of clinical data (e.g. encounters, lab tests) are displayed by row. Each piece of data, indicated as a little grey dot, is stored in FHIR, an open data standard that can be used by any healthcare institution. A deep learning model analyzed a patient’s chart by reading the timeline from left to right, from the beginning of a chart to the current hospitalization, and used this data to make different types of predictions. (Source: Google)

The second part of this system would be the application of deep learning to the standardised data. A chronological reading of all the data points involved helps to highlight the factors that are most crucial for prediction purposes. This data would then be visible in the third part, a doctor facing interface that features these predictions in a format consumable to them. Another aspect of this would be to highlight pertinent medical events and data from the past, which removes the need for the physician to go through a large number of notes and records related to the patient.

While Google isn’t providing any new comments on the system, the blog post mentioned earlier goes on to show how the investigation used 46,864,534,945 retrospective EHR data points collected from 216,221 adult patients hospitalized for at least 24 hours at two US academic medical centres. Armed with this data, the deep learning models were able to successfully predict in-hospital mortality, unplanned re-admissions in a 30-day span, elongated stay durations and ultimately, diagnoses at the time of discharge with an accuracy that was not only superior to a manual analysis of the data, but also predictive systems that worked off of smaller data sets.

A deep learning model was used to render a prediction 24 hours after a patient was admitted to the hospital. The timeline (top of figure) contains months of historical data and the most recent data is shown enlarged in the middle. The model “attended” to information highlighted in red that was in the patient’s chart to “explain” its prediction. In this case study, the model highlighted pieces of information that make sense clinically. (Source: Google Research)

The potential and the competition

Before EHR, there was a lack of enough data to efficiently take actions in healthcare for the patient’s benefit. Since EHR, it can be argued that there’s an overabundance of data that can prove to be a hindrance to physicians and medical professionals. A system like the one described in the patent answers two important questions that plague physicians every day – which patient requires my attention the most, and which part of their records should I focus on.

Last year’s report by MeitY titled Adoption of Electronic Health Records: A Roadmap for India, highlights the obstacles to a centralised system like this in India. A large number of hospitals and medical facilities in our country lack the basic information and communication infrastructure that is crucial for such systems to be reliable and operational. On top of that, much of the EHR data in India is stored in privatised silos, with no exchange between private hospitals, which see 75% of outpatients and 60% of inpatients in India.

While the exact situation of the doctor-patient ratio seems to be dependent on whether you take only allopathic doctors into consideration or not, it is no secret that the healthcare system in the country could improve, especially when it comes to better patient care and efficiency. A system like this, from a company, as deeply invested in India as Google, could prove to be a significant change-maker. Unless competing offerings from Apple and Amazon break ground first. 

Amazon is also invested in this area with Amazon Comprehend Medical, last explained by the company in November 2018, working almost identically to Google’s project. Interestingly, Amazon has also filed a patent earlier for Alexa to be able to pick up on a cold or a cough from a person’s voice, detecting a deviation from the norm and maybe even suggesting possible remedies or medication. 

Apple’s ResearchKit puts the iPhone’s sensors at the disposal of researchers to carry out studies.

Apple, on the other hand, has also announced its intentions to move into the same space. With Apple Watch with a single-lead ECG, as well as the Apple Health Record, there are other things also that indicate Apple’s intentions to be a platform friendly to developers looking to build healthcare offerings off of their platform. ResearchKit and CareKit SDKs allow researchers to use the iPhone for research purposes and also to use its sensors to monitor patients. Multiple startups have used these SDKs to build their offerings, like Glow and One Drop. If Google makes something similar available to startups, especially in India, it could open up the doors to a lot of Indian startups to leverage Google’s massive data mine to build affordable healthcare software for the masses. 

OnePlus 7 Pro specs leaked in entirety ahead of May 14 launch

While the OnePlus 7 series of handsets will be officially announced on May 14, details about the upcoming phones keep leaking out. After numerous renders, reports and leaks that revealed some specs of the phone bit by bit, the full spec sheet of the OnePlus 7 Pro has now surfaced online. The information reveals what the phone might have to offer, down to its dimensions. The latest report comes via renown tipster, Roland Quandt who has also tweeted out the phone’s alleged German pricing.

OnePlus 7 Pro leaked specifications

The listing tips at a 6.67-inch ‘Fluid’ AMOLED display on the phone with a 1440×3120 pixel resolution. It’s display is said to feature 90Hz max refresh rate and 516ppi pixel density. It’s powered by the Snapdragon 855 SoC and is running on OxygenOS, on top of Android 9 Pie. It is said to come in three variants, one with 6GB RAM + 128GB storage, another with 8GB RAM + 256GB storage and the top most version with 12GB RAM + 256GB storage. In line with the latest rumours, the phone’s storage is said to be UFS 3.0 Nand flash but there’s apparently no microSD card storage support. 

Coming to optics, the OnePlus 7 Pro is confirmed to feature triple rear cameras. The listing tips at a 48MP Sony IMX586 sensor with f/1.6 aperture, and OIS support. There’s The secondary 16MP wide-angle sensor is said to be paired with a f/2.2 aperture to deliver 117 degrees FOV, and a tertiary 8MP sensor with f/2.4 aperture, 3x optical zoom and 78mm focal length could also be present. The main camera is touted to support Phase Detection Auto Focus (PDAF), along with Laser AF and Continuous AF. The phone’s main camera should be capable of recording 4K video at 30fps/60fps, 1080p videos at 30fps/60fps, 720p videos at 30fps, and super slow motion 1080p and 720p videos at 240fps and 480fps respectively.

On the front is a 16MP Sony IMX471 sensor with f/2.0 aperture, EIS, and 1080p, 720p video recording support at 30fps. The handset might come equipped with stereo speakers and might be backed by a 4000mAh battery that supports Warp Charge 30 (5V/6A). While Quandt is a fairly reliable source, we suggest you exercise some skepticism since very few details about the OnePlus 7 Pro are official..

OnePlus 7 Pro leaked pricing

If Quandt’s report is to be believed, OnePlus 7 Pro might turn out to be more expensive than one might expect. The company is said to charge EUR 699 (Rs 54,700 approx) for the 6GB RAM + 128GB storage option and EUR 749 (Rs 58,600 approx) for its 8GB RAM + 256GB storage variant. The top-most 12GB RAM + 256GB storage option could cost, wait for it, EUR 819 (Rs 64,100 approx).

Motorola Moto E6 leaked renders show phone sans fingerprint sensor

Motorola is holding a launch event on May 15 in Brazil and is expected to launch the Moto One Vision. As per the latest report, we may also see the unveiling of another device from the company, the Moto E6, which has been leaked in a render. Moto E-Series phones are company’s affordable offering and cater to the masses that look to buy phones in the Rs 6000-Rs 8000 price sement.

The Moto E6 will succeed the Moto E5 which was announced last year. The leaked photos show that the front of the E6 looks similar to its predecessor – a tall display surrounded by bezels and the Motorola branding on the thick chin. On the back, the phone is quite different from the Moto E5, and sports a single lens camera module on the top left corner. There is no camera bump that we are so used to seeing on most of the Motorola devices.

There is a centrally-aligned batwing logo, and reportedly, it does not sport a fingerprint sensor. Other design elements include volume rocker and power button on the right edge, a headphone jack at the top and front camera on the left side of the earpiece. The phone is also expected to feature a MaxVision display with 18:9 aspect ratio – same as that was used in the Moto E5 smartphone.

Moto E6 expected specifications:

Under the hood, the phone may feature a Qualcomm Snapdragon 430 mobile platform, accompanied by 2GB of RAM and 16GB/ 32GB expandable storage. The phone may feature a 5.45-inch HD+ MaxVision display. When it comes to the camera, the phone may sport a 13MP sensor at the back, and a 5MP front shooter. The phone is likely to come with Android 9 Pie out-of-the-box.

Realme X, Realme X Lite complete specs revealed on TENAA ahead of May 15 official announcement

Realme will launch the Realme X smartphone on May 15 but the company can’t seem to keep the phone’s details from leaking out ahead of the announcement. While the Realme X is confirmed, previous reports suggest that there would also be a Realme X Lite or Young variant, which is speculated to be the rebranded Realme 3 Pro. The TENAA listing of the Realme 3 Pro previously revealed the design of the Realme X and now, it has been updated with full specifications, along with the specs of the Realme X Lite. The Realme X sports the model number RMX1901, while the Realme X Lite is listed with the model number RMX1851.

Realme X and X Lite specifications listed on TENAA 

As per the TENAA listing, the Realme X would come equipped with a 6.5-inch Full HD+ AMOLED display with a 2340 x 1080p resolution. It runs on an unnamed  2.2 GHz octa-core processor, which is rumoured to be Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 845 chip. The handset is running Android Pie and is listed with 4GB RAM + 64GB storage but is expected to be launched in additional variants. 

A 48MP Sony IMX586 sensor is mentioned in the rear-camera spec, along with a secondary 5MP depth sensor. On the front might be a 16MP sensor, which will be housed in the pop-up camera assembly. The phone could be backed by a 3,680 mAh battery, feature an in-display fingerprint sensor and might be announced in Black-Blue and White colour models. 

Coming to the Realme X Lite, it is listed running on a 2.2 GHz octa-core processor, which is speculated to be the Snapdragon 710. The listing tips at 4/6GB RAM variants with 64/128GB of storage options and a 6.3-inch Full HD+ LCD display with 2340 x 1080p resolution. The handset might feature a 16MP + 5MP dual camera sensors on the back and a 25MP shooter on the front. The supplementing images suggest a rear-mounted fingerprint sensor and the listing hints at a 3,960mAh battery. 

OnePlus users speed dial contacts are getting erased everyday, company promises fix in next update

As OnePlus gears up for the launch of the next iteration of its flagship devices, the OnePlus 7 and the OnePlus 7 Pro on May 14, several users of older OnePlus devices have complained that the contacts they saved as Speed Dials are getting reset everyday. Apparently, this has been an issue since January. The good news is that the company has said that the bug will be fixed in the next update.

“For the past couple of days, the speed dial contacts are disappearing again and again. Every day all the contacts are getting erased in the speed dial list. Is anyone else also experiencing the same issue? Is there any reason for (sic) why this is happening? Request OnePlus team to fix the bug as it is very annoying when it happens every day,” a user said on the OnePlus forum. Another user says that his/her speed dial is automatically resetting everyday. “The message shows no speed dial contact and it reset everyday in morning. I am currently on 9.0.0 update.”

The problem is being faced by the users of the OnePlus 5 and the subsequent phones that have launched so far. While there haven’t been any answers on why this is happening, some are saying that cache could be the problem. They even advised those affected to clear the cache. However, the solution does not seem to be working for a large part of the complainants.

Recently, OnePlus released the open betas for four of its older phones, the OnePlus 5, the OnePlus 5T, the OnePlus 6 and the OnePlus 6T, bringing some display-related updates as well as quick reply support. The open betas bring these features and optimisations to all these phones. However, there is an India-only feature for the OnePlus 6/6T devices. Under File Manager, the company has added an Intelligent cleanup feature that is anticipated to clean clutter from phones.

New gravitational wave-detectors could help scientists solve more cosmic mysteries

Gravitational waves are disturbances in the fabric (or curvature) of spacetime. They’re believed to be generated by accelerated masses, which propagate these ripples outward from the source at the speed of light. In the past, they have helped us understand a good deal about matter and black holes. Now, however, we hear news of gravitational-wave observatories cropping up on Earth and in space. These observatories should help scientists dive deeper into the matter (sorry for the pun).

Since gravitational waves are very weak, writes Space.com in its recent article, they’re extremely difficult to spot. Apparently, Albert Einstein himself was not sure whether they actually existed or would ever be detected. But to everyone’s surprise they were discovered—in 2015, using the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). The observatory consists of a pair of detectors: one in Washington and one in Louisiana. Each detector is reportedly shaped like the letter L and has legs about 4 kilometres long.

Since LIGO’s laser-based detectors are approximately 3,000 kilometres apart, it can take up to ten milliseconds for a gravitational wave to go from one detector to the other. Researchers use this time difference to figure out where the waves are coming from. As more such observatories crop up, scientists will be better equipped to detect the source of gravitational waves. One of the newest detector facilities is called Virgo and it’s located in Pisa, Italy.

Even with such a large and extensive setup, only the strongest gravitational waves get picked up by LIGO and Virgo. The key is to have more detectors set up. “Beyond 2025, scientists are discussing two advanced gravitational-wave observatories — the Einstein Telescope and the Cosmic Explorer,” writes Space.com. They’re expected to be placed underground to reduce noise derived from seismic vibrations. Reducing noise is believed to boost sensitivity to gravitational waves in these detectors.

Cover image courtesy: NASA

OnePlus 7 Pro Experience Pop-Up happening on May 17 in New Delhi and on May 15 in seven Indian cities: All you need to know

OnePlus is all set to launch its OnePlus 7 lineup of handsets on May 14. The smartphone maker has been hosting pop-up events for some of its offerings and the same will be organised for the OnePlus 7 series as well. OnePlus has announced that it will host pop-up events in seven Indian cities on May 15 and a “one-of-a-kind OnePlus Experience Pop-Up” on May 17 in New Delhi. At 7 PM on May 15, the company will host regular pop-up stores in Bangalore, New Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Pune, Chennai and Ahmedabad. Additionally, the ‘OnePlus Experience Pop-Up’ that will happen at 7 PM on May 17 at Amphitheatre, Select City Walk, New Delhi, will feature an “experiential zone” to enable consumers to check out the OnePlus 7 Pro.

Consumers will get to buy the OnePlus 7 Pro at the regular and at the Experience Pop-Up store. The company says the smartphone will be available in limited quantities but those who purchase the phone at these pop-ups could win some additional merch as well. The exclusive goodies early buyers of the phone can get includes the OnePlus Type-C Bullets earphones, which performs rather well for their price, and Netflix and Amazon Vouchers. They can also win OnePlus tote bags, OnePlus back cases, and OnePlus ‘Never Settle’ T-shirts.

As for the upcoming OnePlus 7 series, the OnePlus 7 Pro has leaked numerous times and except for the official confirmation, there’s hardly anything left to know about it. The smartphone is reported to come equipped with a 6.67-inch display that might feature a 90Hz refresh rate. It is expected to run on the Snapdragon 855 SoC and might be launched with up to 12GB RAM and 256GB of storage space versions. Almost all renders of the phone till now suggest the presence of a nearly bezel-less display and a pop-up front camera. On the back, reports suggest a triple camera setup with a 48MP + 16MP + 8P sensor configuration. 

You can read our rumour roundup of the OnePlus 7 Pro here to know almost everything that’s leaked about the phone till now. 

Samsung announces new 64 megapixel ISOCELL camera sensor for smartphones

Samsung Semi Conductors has just announced a new smartphone imaging sensor called the Bright GW1. This sensor has a resolution of 64 megapixels, uses Samsung’s ISOCELL technology amongst many others, and is capable of 4-pixel binning to yield 16-megapixel binned images.

The press release on Samsung’s website says that “ISOCELL Bright GW1 is a 64Mp image sensor that features the highest resolution in Samsung’s 0.8μm-pixel image sensor lineup. With pixel-merging Tetracell technology and remosaic algorithm, GW1 can produce bright 16Mp images in low-light environments and highly-detailed 64Mp shots in brighter settings. To take pictures resembling the way the human eye perceives its surroundings in a mixed light environment, GW1 supports real-time high dynamic range (HDR) of up to 100-decibels (dB) that provides richer hues. In comparison, the dynamic range of a conventional image sensor is at around 60dB, while that of the human eye is typically considered to be around 120dB.”

In addition, Samsung has also announced the ISOCELL Bright GM2, a new version of the 48-megapixel sensor that Samsung introduced in the market a few months ago. Both the GW1 and GM2 feature Samsung’s Dual conversion Gain technology, which is essentially the sensor’s ability to switch between two native ISO values depending on ambient lighting conditions.

The megapixel war in smartphones has once again begun, but unlike the previous attempts, where manufacturers just packed more and more pixels into a sensor, this time it’s very different. Besides adding more pixels, manufacturers like Sony and Samsung are also increasing the sensor size, now going all the way up to 1/2 inches in size. In addition, there is also a lot of software optimisations and use of AI to squeeze every last bit of image quality out of a sensor.

Samsung’s GM1 sensor so far has only been seen in the Vivo V15 Pro, and hasn’t been as widely used as Sony’s IMX586 chip. Hopefully, the upcoming Samsung Galaxy Note 10 will feature one of Samsung’s large format sensors, making the device stand out from the existing S10 series.