Six Considerations to Address Ambient Computing Challenges
There are simple considerations that you can build into your product roadmap to address the key ambient computing challenges outlined in the previous chapter and ensure your platform is ambient-ready. These include the following:
Democratizing security and establishing privacy and trust
Improving experiences without physical touch
Investments in interoperability and connectivity
A focus on low power solutions
Software-defined technology
The distribution of intelligence
Democratizing security helps ensure that companies adhere to the relevant regulations that apply to ambient computing. This will improve public acceptance of the vast amounts of personal data that will be collected to deliver ambient experiences. To achieve privacy and trust, devices based on a hardware root of trust must be established. However, this also must be broadened to address accountability, fairness, transparency, and ethics. Finally, the wider industry must be equipped with the ability to detect and respond to attacks before they affect an entire network.
As ambient experiences become more prevalent, features like voice commands and gesture control become more important. Therefore, the tech industry must explore how these features interact with the seamless deployment of ambient experiences, while also removing the need for ongoing physical contact with devices.
High levels of interoperability play a key role in ensuring that all the highly connected ambient compute systems deliver seamless, personalized experiences. Also, as many ambient experiences happen while people are “on the move,” connectivity and location technologies require further investments to enable the continuation of these experiences outside of the smart home or in buildings.
Ambient experiences require more advanced compute workloads, especially for technologies in ambient compute systems that have AI capabilities. However, this must take place on low-power technologies ‘at the edge’ to ensure quicker, more secure ambient experiences. Due to the continuous nature of ambient computing, there is also the consideration that this compute must be “always on,” but in a way that is power efficient to prevent the battery from draining, while also being sustainable.
To ensure that the hardware in ambient compute systems has a long lifecycle, hardware platforms that are compatible with the latest software development platforms must be available so any new software updates and features can be continuously added. This helps avoid installed technologies, especially those that are “hard-to-reach” in buildings, becoming quickly redundant and irrelevant.
As data is fused from multiple data sources, there must be a method of fusing the data and managing competing computing demands. The industry must also consider how the different endpoints in ambient compute systems and edge devices interact with each other to enable the personalization of ambient experiences.
