Ant+ at CES 2013
January, 2013, CES, Las Vegas—We talked with some people working under the umbrella organization Ant+. The organization is promoting interface specifications for sports equipment interconnectivity. The alliance had a number of diverse showing off their products, and demonstrating the ability to interconnect diverse functions across multiple pieces of equipment.
The interface is a short-range, low-power wireless interface that is similar to Bluetooth low energy. Embedded protocol transceiver is designed for periodic transfers of small amounts of information, resulting in low power consumption. The standard offers high interoperability, an infrastructure to enable machine to machine communications, and provides authentication and other security features. The architecture is a self assembling array with no master or hub required. The network is self configuring and reconfigurable, and an application layer takes care of the pairing and handshake configurations.
Because this is part of the protocol stack, it can be used for many general fitness tasks as well as medical functions. In addition, the interface can control music players or other devices, and there are apps that can connect the health and fitness devices to smart phones through a WiFi interface.
ANT+ is primarily designed for collection and transfer of sensor data, to manageable units of various types. The three main areas of operation are sport, wellness, and home health. It can be used for data-transfer for a number of devices such as;
heart rate monitors, speed sensors, and activity monitors. Health monitors such as; body mass index measuring devices, blood pressure monitors, blood glucose meters, and pulse oximeters are also available.
The ANT+ Alliance is organized by Dynastream Innovations Inc, a subsidiary of Garmin Ltd.. As of September 30, 2010 it had more than 300 members including Adidas, AG, Concept2, Garmin, Suunto, McLaren, Microsoft, Sony Ericsson, Texas Instruments, Timex, and Trek.
