http://www.wbd101.com


make sure to watch the video shot at ces

Introduction
Well Being Digital (WBD101) is a Hong Kong based company that aims to enable affordable & accurate underlying technologies for mHealth/wearable devices. We have successfully implemented our algorithms onto Infra-red sensors, accelerometer and gyroscope, we experienced in supporting productization and commercialization for Fortune 500 customers (Parrot, Philips, Motorola, Haier America, New Balance, etc.) We target to help brand owners add value to their wearables / hearables / sensorhubs.  If you are looking for earphones factories that uses our technology, we can introduce you to Foxlink, TaiSing Industries or Awei. Please contact sales@wbd101.com You can read about ActivHearts™ at http://www.wbd101.com/#a4, https://www.facebook.com/ActivHearts or http://t.qq.com/WBD1014825

Product
Whether you are designing wearables or hearables, we provide sensing algorithms and hardware reference design to help you, including heart rate sensing and motion sensing. Our technology is probably the lowest power consuming, the smallest in mechanical requirements and the lowest cost and it is certainly 3rd party apps compatible, including Polar Beat™, Runkeeper™, MiCoach™, Wahoo Utility™, Runtastic™ and any apps that is compatible to the Bluetooth Smart Heart Rate Profile (HRP). Bluetooth Smart has been enabled starting in iPhone 4S, Android 4.3 and Windows 8 GDR3.

Contact Person
Mr. Mr. Kow

The adjacent possible has a new name/names and some new geography,


A Valencel sort of company?

lets see


Hong Kong Startup Well Being Digital (WBD101) is One of only Ten Startup Worldwide to be Selected for GIN goAustria Programme
With almost 50 patents and technologies like ActivHearts (heart rate sensing) and Mogo (motion sensing), WBD101 is probably the only Asian startup with in-depth in-house expertise on SmartBody sensing technology + Mobile AI.
Google +0 6 7 54 0

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WBD101 has developed extremely accurate heart rate measurement technology. We hope that the accelerator program will allow them to explore the advantages of Austria as an IoT hub in Europe.
HONG KONG, October 02, 2017 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Republic of Austria, home to just 8.7 million people in Central Europe, is also home to many Multi-National Corporations such as Austria Micro AMS, Palfinger, Red Bull and Swarovski. Austria is where acid resistant penicillin was discovered so that it could be administered orally and the country is within 3 hours by air to all of Europe, which makes it an ideal place to become the IoT Centre of Europe.

"We are also happy to announce that Hong Kong startup Well Being Digital was selected to explore the Austrian startup scene with a participation in the GIN goAustria Programme, all expenses paid. WBD101 has developed extremely accurate heart rate measurement technology that can be applied to earphones and wrist watches. We hope that their participation in the accelerator program GIN goAustria will allow them to explore the advantages of Austria as an IoT hub in Europe," says Franz Roessler, Austrian Trade Commissioner in Hong Kong. "Well Being Digital is the only Hong Kong company to represent Hong Kong and all of China in the Austrian government's incubator programme "goAustria". The programme enables participants to get acquainted to the Austrian and European markets. The programme consists of briefings, site visits, and one-to-one work with a mentor and public presentations in front of possible clients, investors and other Austrian partners."

With almost 50 patents in the SmartBody Sensing area, WBD101's technology recently enabled products like JBL Reflect Fit and Skytech's FTL-E08 to offer very accurate sensing capabilities for the consumers that they target.

"We are very excited to be the only Hong Kong company to participate in this world renowned accelerator program that is sponsored by the Austrian Ministry of Science, Research and Economy," says Kow Ping, Co-Founder of WBD101. "With our wealth of patents and technology in SmartBody Sensing, WBD101 hopes to collaborate with Austrian startups and multinationals to develop smart devices to solve healthcare issues that are affecting lifestyles around the world."

WBD101's international award winning ActivHearts heart rate sensing technology has been applied to both sports and fitness devices like the JBL Reflect Fit, as well as in healthcare devices like the Hera Leto One (World's First AI-Assisted Earphones for 15 mins Power Walk and 10 mins Stress Relieving Playlist).

Founded in 2012, Well Being Digital Limited (WBD101) is a Hong Kong based company whose first patents are dated back to 2008, incubated by the Hong Kong Science and Technology Park (HKSTP) it has offices in HKSTP and Shenzhen so as to provide very timely support to B2B customers during their design, tests and production stages. WBD101 focuses on very elaborate SmartBody Sensing Technology. Besides ActivHearts, it has highly accurate motion sensing technology (Mogo). Over the years, WBD101 won numerous international awards including the Best Wearable Mobile Tech Awards at the Mobile World Congress 2016, Special & Gold Awards at the 43rd Geneva Inventions Conventions and 2016 WITSA Global ICT Award.

The Austrian Trade Commission in Hong Kong covers the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau as well as the provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi Zhuang, Guizhou, Hainan, Hunan and Yunnan and the Philippines. In Guangzhou, ADVANTAGE AUSTRIA maintains a branch office (Austrian Consulate General - Commercial Section). Helmed by Commissioner Franz Roessler, the Austrian Trade Commission has been exploring business opportunities and providing services to Austrian companies in the region.



Just maybe we have more things to read with QUIK and WBD101.
The "adjacent possible" says it will happen. :-)

Have some fun...

this snip is from the QUIK blog....


 It is from a company called “Cleer, Inc.” for a product they call the Edge Voice headphone. This product allows customers using it to connect to Amazon’s Alexa voice services via Bluetooth technology to make calls, stream audio, order products, or check schedules and set reminders. As a bonus feature, it also includes built-in heart-rate monitoring.




So who's Heart rate algos are in this device?

Must be Valencel?

Nope.



"We are very honoured and excited to enable Cleer EDGE Voice and EDGE Pulse with ActivHearts," says Mr. Kow Ping, CEO of WBD101. "Our ActivHearts technology is a highly accurate heart rate sensing technology that is mechanically extremely small and comfortable, the only technology out there to allow our customers to have very elegant product designs with our sensors well hidden."


So, the heart rate IS NOT Valencel in the Cleer device we are in.

I like it better this way. 


WBD101's technology has been adopted by customers such as JBL Reflect Fit, Pioneer SEC-S801BT and Hera Leto ONE, besides the Cleer EDGE Voice and EDGE Pulse.



Is it any good?

back in '16



Well Being Digital Wins The Best Wearable Mobile Technology Award at GSMA Mobile World Congress




"Winning The Best Wearable Mobile Technology Award marks a remarkable milestone in our venture", said Wallace Wong, CTO & Founder of Well Being Digital Ltd and a graduate from The Engineering School of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology where his research and development journey started.

WBD101 started developing ActivHearts™ technology since 2006, our patented technology effectively removes motion artifact even when the wearer is moving so as to ensure very high accuracy.

for the casual reader...

the algos that do the motion compensation have been on the QUIK slide deck for yrs. as something that taxes the MCUs a little bit....

Nice QUIK, its a new name for Heart rate and other algos, can you do more and more with these guys?


Oh, you already are?  tnks.

a distillation post for those pressed for time....



Acronyx
As a result CPUs are quickly being left behind in being able to address today’s compute requirements. 

From CES and Brian F. in China. I will rewrite it....

MCUs are quickly being left behind in being able to address today’s compute requirements.


The companies who were offering embedded FPGA IP for ASIC design had minimal tools at best, and most chip design teams were highly reluctant to give up a bunch of silicon real estate on their device for something that might or might not be useful.



those eFPGA software tools jobs are a great allocation of precious $$. thnks QUIK.


the margin, between the voice as part of the trinity and the value of the eFPGA IP........


and finally for those worried bout competition.....


these companies cannot really be considered “competitors” with each other because each one (at this point) seems to be focusing on a particular market segment or application area. It would be surprising if there were many situations where a design team was evaluating more than one of these for a particular project.

hence the difference in nodes and process...

We are on the right one 22FDX, there is a reason we were picked, they just go well together. They would NOT want anybody else.

with the FAQ...we (currently) do NOT compete with these guys.

But some of what they say is true for ALL of the players.....


Next-Generation AI Hardware needs to be Flexible and Programmable



Achronix Semiconductor Corp>>Blogs>>Next-Generation AI Hardware needs to be Flexible and Programmable
Steve Mensor, Vice President, Marketing
January 19, 2018


Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping the way the world works, opening up countless opportunities in commercial and industrial systems. Applications span diverse markets such as autonomous driving, medical diagnostics, home appliances, industrial automation, adaptive websites and financial analytics. Even the communications infrastructure linking these systems together is moving towards automated self-repair and optimization. These new architectures will perform functions such as load balancing and allocating resources such as wireless channels and network ports based on predictions learned from experience.

These applications demand high performance and, in many cases, low latency to respond successfully to real-time changes in conditions and demands. They also require power consumption to be as low as possible, rendering unusable, solutions that underpin machine-learning in cloud servers where power and cooling are plentiful. A further requirement is for these embedded systems to be always on and ready to respond even in the absence of a network connection to the cloud. This combination of factors calls for a change in the way that hardware is designed.

Let’s look at some of the main classes of hardware devices typically used to carry out such computing tasks and analyze the trade-offs associated with each of them:

CPUs
CPUs are about as flexible as a device can be, intended to be a completely general-purpose device. They’re also easy to program. However, this flexibility naturally comes at a cost. The large overhead involved in moving data and instructions around a general-purpose architecture makes CPUs relatively inefficient and power-hungry. As a result CPUs are quickly being left behind in being able to address today’s compute requirements. 

From  CES and Brian F. in China. I will rewrite it....

MCUs are quickly being left behind in being able to address today’s compute requirements. 


Designers have therefore chosen to look at other architectures to supplement this generalized functionality.

GPUs
Another route, depending on the task required, is to look at a graphics processing unit (GPU) to solve the problem. GPUs came into their own from the 90s onwards, where they were generally used to aid CPUs in PCs with graphical processing tasks (for which they are architecturally optimized). In fact, GPUs, with their many compute cores and ‘seas of ALUs’, can be used to accelerate many different types of highly parallelized functions. However, the trade-off is an inability to perform generalist compute tasks along with being relatively power-hungry.

ASICs
At the furthest end of the solution spectrum are ASICs. Manufactured specifically to support their target application, ASICs can be designed to waste zero time or energy on anything else. However, the design and manufacturing of an ASIC, as most designers will attest, is expensive, involves high commitment to a limited number of functions, and offers almost no capacity for more generalized compute or adaptation for other uses after the fact.

A huge proportion of our customers are already at this stage — designing high-performance ASICs (as the only means of addressing the intense compute requirements they face). Yet even here, many of the customers that speak to us are already having to think about alternate approaches that might allow them to produce higher-performing devices at a lower overall cost, as well as integrating a degree of functional flexibility.

So what are the alternatives?



FPGAs
There is another way. FPGAs can offer flexibility close to that of a CPU with the efficiency approaching that of an ASIC. Like ASICs, FPGAs allow the designer to implement the algorithm in logic, delivering huge parallelism and a hardware-optimized solution. Unlike ASICs, FPGAs can be reprogrammed with a new design in the blink of an eye. Compared to CPUs or GPUs, today’s FPGAs are extremely power efficient, able to provide many more operations per watt than processor-based solutions.

But there is an even more attractive solution.

Speedcore eFPGA IP
Achronix has taken things a step further. Rather than simply advocating the use of a discrete FPGA, why not bring that architecture on-board your CPU or SoC and still enjoy further increase in performance?

An eFPGA removes the need to communicate chip-to-chip through bandwidth-limited connections such as PCI-Express and the need for data to be serialized and de-serialized, plus provides an extremely large number of on-chip interconnects to the FPGA fabric — resulting in higher SoC system performance, lower power, reduced die size and overall lower system cost compared to discrete-chip FPGAs.

Achronix’s Speedcore™ eFPGA IP can be integration into ASICs and SoCs to provide a customized programmable fabric. Customers specify their logic, memory and DSP resource needs, then Achronix configures the Speedcore IP to meet their individual requirements. Speedcore look-up-tables (LUTs), RAM blocks and DSP64 blocks can be assembled like building blocks to create the optimal programmable fabric for any given application. Speedcore eFGPAs are currently in production on TSMC’s 16nm process (and in development on TSMC 7nm). Speedcore eFPGAs are supported by the silicon-proven Achronix ACE design tools.

On top of several other benefits, a Speedcore eFPGA solution can offer cache-coherency, share memory resources for faster load-in and load-out, and can reconfigure its entire architecture within 2ms per 100,000 lookup tables.

Existing solutions such as multi-core CPUs, GPGPU and standalone FPGAs can be used to support advanced AI algorithms such as deep learning, but they are poorly positioned to handle the increased demands developers are placing on hardware as their machine-learning architectures evolve. The Achronix Speedcore eFPGA is based upon proven technology and can offer designers a route to faster, smaller, cheaper and more power-efficient solutions, allowing designers to continue to increase their compute in line with rapidly-escalating market requirements.



Commentry: Make sure to read the Kevin Morris item also.

1. precious QUIK $$ resources are being spent for a dedicated eFPGA software tools team. They will stay on it and improve the tools real time.
Nice.

2. This article separate the eFPGA players; Achronyx and QUIK do NOT compete at this time. That shows in the fact that we are on 22FDX and they are on Finfet. 
BUT much of the reasons why are THE SAME.