we have tested our Sensor hubs for AMS sensors.... Maybe this one...

note that this does relate to gesture…..

from AMS sensor archives….

Ams to Acquire AppliedSensor

Jeremie Bouchaud, Senior Principal Analyst, MEMS & Sensors and Industrial Electronics, IHS
05 June 2014

In agreeing to acquire 100 percent of the shares in AppliedSensor, ams is following a strong strategy to grow from an analog semiconductor IC company to a diversified sensor and interface IC player, and with this acquisition, to more a highly integrated sensor solutions company with differentiated technology.

Historically, ams has very successfully provided ASICs for sensors—IHS estimates that ams holds 60 percent of the ASIC business for MEMS microphones for instance. Ams also is successful with interface ICs for inductive sensors and for medical imaging systems.

Ams added Hall based magnetic position sensors mainly for industrial and automotive applications. The company has a small share with this activity so far (estimated 2 percent) but shows some growth with recent contracts for chassis systems from Continental. It is commercializing a 3D Hall approach that will make it competitive with other major Hall suppliers like Melexis.

Its first major acquisition began in mid-2011 with its acquisition of the leading light sensor supplier TAOS, which gave it access to top positions for light sensors with 37 percent market share (source IHS Light Sensor report). With this acquisition ams became the sole supplier of ambient light sensors for Apple’s Phone and iPad for instance. ams provides also the sophisticated light sensor in the Samsung Galaxy S5 with a combined color, proximity

and gesture sensor

in a single package as revealed by IHS teardowns.
Targeting the handset market?

IHS believes that ams targets the handset market with the acquisition of AppliedSensor. The main application today for this gas sensor technology is air quality in cars. However IHS believes that MEMS gas sensors such as developed by AppliedSensor will enter smartphones in the next three years for air quality monitoring and for breath analyzer. This is most probably the real motivation for ams’s moves.

AppliedSensor is not the only company with this MEMS gas sensing technology. SGX Sensortech (Switzerland) is also in volume production e.g. for air quality in automotive. Other players are emerging with a similar technology such as the US start-up Synkera or the Swiss company Sensirion. IHS believe that ams chose AppliedSensor for following reasons:

AppliedSensor is the first company having managed to break into consumer applications until now with this gas sensor technology. AppliedSensor’s technology is for instance the heart of Reckitt Benckiser’s Air Wick FreshMatic Odor Detect Products in stores since January 2011.

One should mention that ams is already partnering with AppliedSensor and Samsung in a European project on gas sensors since January 2014.

There is a white paper on gesture at the AMS site….

Samsung and Paypal teaming up for a payment system on the next Gear smartwatch

By Joel Joseph on September 22, 2014

Just a few weeks back, Samsung unveiled its first standalone smartwatch with cellular 3G connectivity, the Samsung Gear S and now we already have reports about the next generation of smartwatches under development by the company which is scheduled to release next year.

This news is not at all surprising given that Samsung has always believed in expanding the range of their devices as soon as possible. And this strategy actually helped the company become the number one smartphone manufacturer in the world.

It looks like the South Korean giant is heading towards the same direction with its smartwatch range. Business Korea reports that Samsung is already working on its next smartwatch, the seventh one in the range which will come with a number of features including one which will make paying much simpler and easier than before.

Samsung is reportedly teaming up with PayPal, one of the most renowned payment companies for this feature which will directly rival Apple Pay on the recently announced Apple Watch.

Although the Cupertino giant announced Apple Watch on September 9^th press event, it won’t be available for purchase until next year. This means, the Apple Pay feature which is going to debut with the new watch will only be available after its launch in 2015.

This gives Samsung around 4-5 months to develop and work on its own payment system.

Both Samsung and PayPal need this new feature to work. Samsung has to come with a feature which will be useful on a wide scale and will attract new customers while PayPal, which is already threatened by small startups worldwide, has to retain its popularity among customers.

The new payment feature will use biometric authentication for login. So, the next smartwatch range will most likely come with a fingerprint sensor, like the recent Galaxy smartphones. This also means that the feature may not work with existing Samsung smartwatches, unless the company figures out a way to use the sensor on its smartphones to complete the authentication.

One Samsung executive said the following to Business Korea, “We are currently developing the smart watch equipped with fingerprint identification technology and relevant solutions through cooperation with PayPal, the world’s most renowned financial transaction service company, as well as Synaptics, a global company specialized in biometric verification. By the earliest, the third generation smart watch to be released early next year will have this new system in which payment is authorized immediately when users identify themselves through biometric sensors such as a fingerprint or login.”

Move To Your Own Rithmio

Stephany Guerrero

8/11/2014

It’s like a scene out of a Minority Report. Swiping his hand left to right a few feet from his laptop, Adam controls Google Maps seemingly by magic. On his wrist is a prototype device that resembles a smart watch. The software powering the device is called Rithmio, and it’s going to revolutionize the gesture recognition market.

Click here for a quick demo of the Google Maps movement

Meet Adam Tilton, CEO and co-founder of Rithmio. Tilton began exploring the gesture recognition technology while he was a doctoral student at Illinois. During the summer of 2013, Tilton attended a wearable technology conference that featured gesture recognition technology demonstrations by some of the leading companies in the world.

So how was the laptop able to detect Tilton’s movements?

Before he demonstrated the Google Maps movement, Tilton taught Rithmio his hand-gestures in less than six seconds. His laptop flashed, “ready-set-go,” and the accelerometer measured his rotations through a Bluetooth connection. He named each hand-gesture, “left-right-up-down.”

“While gesture recognition isn’t something new, there is a tremendous opportunity to improve the accuracy of gesture recognition,” said Tilton.  Tilton felt he had a novel technology idea to do exactly that.  The idea was inspired by technology innovations that Adam had been thinking about and developing as part of his doctoral work at Illinois.

Tilton shared his idea with Prashant Mehta who was then his Ph.D. Advisor and an associate professor in the department of mechanical engineering. What started off as a research project quickly evolved into a startup.

“I’ve collaborated with hundreds of students in my career on project ideas,” said Mehta. “Adam’s passion for his idea, soundness of the concept, and keen business sense caught my attention. Our relationship evolved from academia to business partners because there was such a great fit with both of our personalities and interests.”

Why is the ability to recognize gestures accurately so important?

From people tracking their steps with Fitbit, Thalmic Labs controlling drones with a twist of user’s wrist, to connected gloves that can recognize American Sign Language, gesture-based technologies are gaining momentum in consumer and business sectors.

Accuracy is crucial to this emerging technology because everybody moves differently. The arm movements of a small child playing basketball have variations from the movements of a professional basketball player. The way an elderly person walks differs from how a teenager walks.

Creating algorithms that recognize specific gestures with a high degree of accuracy is a challenge. The result is many products don’t make it to the market at all due to the difficulty of writing gesture recognition software well.

Rithmio’s software has two features that set it apart. The user can train it to recognize distinct gestures, and once trained, it can distinguish the gesture and provide precise analysis.

“Rithmio is enabling,“ Tilton continued. “If you’re Nike and you are creating a wearable device like FuelBand for motion sensing, you have to hire a team of people to develop algorithms and software for you. This drastically slows down product development. Rithmio helps companies innovate.” Tilton said.

Technology that is this precise seems like something out of a future fiction piece. Yet Rithmio plans to release the first version of their software soon. The software will be easy to use and will include a developer’s kit compatible with almost any smart device.

For this start-up, 2014 represents a year of great momentum. Earlier this year, Rithmio won the Cozad competition that is held by the Technology Entrepreneur Center (TEC).

“The Cozad experience served as a learning experience with peers steeped in healthy competition. There is something to be said for being among a group of people all interested in the same thing. Making it to the ‘play-offs’ of entrepreneurship on campus was exciting.

It was a turning point for us to realize Rithmio is bigger than an academic project and has great potential in the market,” Tilton said.

Both Tilton and co-founder, Prashant Mehta, stress how important the entrepreneurial culture on campus is to their start-up.

“The support from the TEC office has been tremendous,” Mehta said. “There is a great spirit of entrepreneurship on this campus, and that energy always gets the boost it needs from the TEC. For Illinois, this is only the start of something great that is only going to grow and expand. Everybody knows of this university as a great research institution. But Illinois has also succeeded in building a supportive entrepreneurial community. Most of our graduate students go on to be professors and researchers. But today I see more and more students innovating, and applying their innovations while they are still in grad school. As an educator it is very heartening to be able to experience the breaking of new ground, by a new generation of innovators and entrepreneurs.”

______

- See more at: http://engineering.illinois.edu/news/article/9079#sthash.axxvns8Z.dpuf

CRAIN'S BLOGSJOHN PLETZ ON TECHNOLOGY

Follow John 

» Get the free John Pletz On Tech e-newsletter

From missiles to wearables: U of I startup gets $650,000

September 25, 2014

Print | Comments

0

0

0

0

Adam Tilton

University of Illinois researchers figure that the same techniques that can be used for tracking missiles and space junk can make wearable fitness devices perform better.

Their startup, Rithmio Inc., has raised $650,000 from investors, led by U of I alum Marcin Kleczynski, founder of antivirus maker Malwarebytes. Other investors include Chicago-based venture funds Hyde Park Venture Partners, Illinois Ventures and Techra Investments, which is run by technology entrepreneur Mark Tebbe, and Champaign-based Serra Ventures.

Rithmio was founded a year ago by U of I engineering professor Prashant Mehta and graduate student Adam Tilton.

They envisioned commercializing their motion-recognition technology for defense companies until Mr. Tilton was at a developers' conference last year. A speaker was trying to demonstrate a next-generation wearable fitness tracker that automatically would recognize different physical activities. But the technology wasn't working very well because it was slow to recognize the different actions, Mr. Tilton said.

"I figured, 'I can do better than that," he said. "We had spent years working on the technology. We had a protoype in about a month."

He declined to go into the specifics of Rithmio's solution but said it is an improvement over other wearables because "we take a different modeling approach that greatly simplifies the problem."

"The classic approach is one size fits all," the 26-year-old Peoria native says. "Instead our new approach allows us to automatically personalize a solution that is unique to the user."

It involves sophisticated algorithms and draws on machine-learning advances at U of I. The two had been working on signal processing and machine learning in Mr. Mehta's lab at the U of I, creating mathematical algorithms for tracking moving targets using radar.

The company won U of I's Cozad New Venture Competitionin April, which was judged by Mr. Klelczynski of Malwarebytes, based in San Jose, California; Mr. Tebbe; and others who later became investors.

They're betting on the come. While Rithmio has been testing its product for a few months and expects to begin a wider beta test soon, it hasn't yet lined up any customers. The company hopes to license the technology to electronics companies that make wearables and fitness trackers, rather than make products itself.

Rithmio is part of a growing stable of U of I tech spinouts, including Diagnostic Photonics, Cellular Diagnostics, ElectronInks and PhotoniCare.

Mr. Tilton says Rithmio's software will result in more accurate devices that automatically recognize particular movements or exercises, allowing athletes to better track their performance. The technology also could help users make sure they're doing exercises correctly.

That same functionality could open the door to a market in physical therapy, helping therapists monitor patients' activity. Rithmio's software could also enable smartphones to function as remote controls for TVs or PowerPoint presentations.

"This a platform for gesture recognition," Mr. Tilton said.

The company has about a half-dozen employees. Mr. Tilton eventually plans to open a Chicago office.

Follow John on Twitter at @JohnPletz.

Using this as a mental model of what is going on at QUIK.  They have a core group of folks now with the focus on gesture recognition.

We are close enough to the real world that QUIK can have the gesture evolve to what works for the end user.....just as Dr. Saxe says in this item he wrote

and that means many user trials, under a variety of conditions to understand what feels natural.  So there will be a flaring of ideas deployed in a variety of products that will result in an understanding of what works and what doesn’t, followed by losing ideas falling out and a focus on refining the survivors, and of course a new burst of creativity in some new area.