Medical applications are leading advancement in 3D printing

---

Does healthcare hold the future for 3D printing? 

---

According to Gartner’s latest Hype Cycle for 3D Printing, medical applications are leading to some of the most significant deployments of the next-gen technology. The research firm’s report reveals that 3D printing of medical devices has reached the “Peak of Inflated Expectations,” but certain specialist applications are already becoming the norm in medical care.

“In the healthcare industry, 3DP is already in mainstream use to produce medical items that need to be tailored to individuals, such as hearing aids and dental devices,” explained Pete Basiliere, Gartner research director.

One notable example is hearing aids, as manufacturers are now offering personalized devices that fit to the exact shape of a customer’s ear.

“This is evidence that using 3DP for mass customization of consumer goods is now viable, especially given that the transition from traditional manufacturing in this market took less than two years. Routine use of 3DP for dental implants is also not far from this level of market maturity,” Basiliere added.

Some medical 3DP technologies are further from mainstream use, but are equally, if not more, exciting. These include hip and knee replacements, which are a $15 billion industry and one of the most common surgical procedures. Early trials using personalized 3D-printed replacements suggest improved healing times and function of the implant, as well as an increased success rate in more complex operations. Given the size of the market, Gartner predicts that 3D-printed hip and knee replacements, in addition to other recurrent internal and external medical devices, will be in mainstream use within two to five years.

Looking further out, at least five to 10 years to mainstream adoption, there is bioprinting. 3D bioprinting, which has been featured in a number of news stories as of late, is found in two categories on the Hype Cycle: one focused on producing living tissues for human transplant, the other for life sciences’ research and development.

Gartner goes on to note that 3D printers have already proven to be capable of creating cells, proteins, DNA and drugs, but are currently being held back by a couple of “significant barriers.”

There is still rapid advancement outside of medical fields as well. While 3D prototyping has for many years been the only mainstream use, it will likely be joined by many technologies that will spur much wider utilization of printers outside of specialist fields.

“Advancements outside of the actual printers themselves may prove to be the catalyst that brings about widespread adoption,” Basiliere said. “Technologies such as 3D scanning, 3D print creation software and 3D printing service bureaus are all maturing quickly, and all — in their own way — have the potential to make high quality 3DP more accessible and affordable.”

3D printing software, for example, has in the past been limited to commercial 3D CAD programs that were not simple to use. Consumer-oriented design libraries and modelling tools are becoming established, providing a far simpler method for producing printable designs. Moreover, 3D scanners are also advancing in adoption and dropping in price, enabling users to create complex printable models of real-world items without any CAD skills.

Though still several years away, the 3D printing of consumable products has been added to the Hype Cycle. This should come to no surprise, given the recent debuts of food, chocolate and even drug printers. Also listed in the “Innovation Trigger” stage include  intellectual property protection, macro 3D printing and classroom 3D printing.

Beyond that, the emergence of 3DP service bureaus continues to accelerate. This enables enthusiasts and organizations to test and experiment with the capabilities of advanced 3DP systems in situations where an investment in purchasing a 3D printer would be hard to justify. As this ecosystem matures around the printers, so market demand and competition will keep increasing and more use cases will become commonplace.

Interested? You can check out the entire report from Gartner here.

[Image: Gartner]

Autonomous vehicles and IoT are the most-hyped technologies of 2015

---

Gartner’s latest Hype Cycle reveals intelligent robots and smart home products are now closer to mainstream. 

---

Another year, another Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies. New to the report in 2015 is the emergence of technologies that support what the firm defines as “digital humanism” — the notion that people are the central focus in the manifestation of digital businesses and digital workplaces.

“The Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies is the broadest aggregate Gartner Hype Cycle, featuring technologies that are the focus of attention because of particularly high levels of interest, and those that Gartner believes have the potential for significant impact,” said Betsy Burton, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “This year, we encourage CIOs and other IT leaders to dedicate time and energy focused on innovation, rather than just incremental business advancement, while also gaining inspiration by scanning beyond the bounds of their industry.”

Major changes in the 2015 Hype Cycle include the placement of autonomous vehicles, which have shifted from pre-peak to peak. While autonomous vehicles are still embryonic, this movement represents a significant advancement, with all major automotive companies putting autonomous vehicles on their near-term roadmaps. Similarly, the growing momentum (from post-trigger to pre-peak) of the smart home has introduced entirely new solutions and platforms enabled by new technology providers and existing manufacturers.

One of the newcomers to this year’s list is smart dust. Categorized in the “innovation trigger” section, smart dust refers to a collection of tiny dust-like sensors or devices which can be used to detect factors like light or sound.

Gartner has defined a set of six “business era models” that enterprises can aspire to in the future. However, since the Hype Cycle is purposely focused on more emerging technologies, it mostly supports the last three of these stages. These include: digital marketing (stage 4), digital business (stage 5) and autonomous (stage 6).

The digital marketing stage sees the emergence of the Nexus of Forces (mobile, social, cloud and information). Enterprises in this stage focus on new and more sophisticated ways to reach consumers, who are more willing to participate in marketing efforts to gain greater social connection, or product and service value. According to the analysts, enterprises that are seeking to achieve this should consider gesture control, hybrid cloud computing, Internet of Things, machine learning, people-literate technology, and speech-to-speech translation.

Moreover, digital business is the first “post-nexus stage” on the roadmap and focuses on the convergence of people, business and things, with the IoT and the concept of blurring the physical and virtual worlds playing prominent roles. Physical assets become digitalized and become equal actors in the business value chain alongside already-digital entities, such as systems and apps.

Gartner notes that enterprises seeking to go past the Nexus of Forces technologies to become a digital business should look to 3D bioprinting, human augmentation, affective computing, augmented reality, bioacoustics sensing, biochips, brain-computer interface, citizen data science, connected home, cryptocurrencies, digital dexterity, digital security, enterprise 3D printing, intelligent robots, smart advisors, gesture control, micro data centers, quantum computing, software-defined security, virtual reality, and wearables.

Lastly, autonomous represents the final “post-nexus stage.” This stage is defined by an enterprise’s ability to leverage technologies that provide human-like or human-replacing capabilities, such as using autonomous vehicles to move people or products and employing cognitive systems to recommend a potential structure for an answer to an email, write texts or answer customer questions. Enterprises seeking to reach this stage to gain competitiveness should consider self-driving cars, smart dust, virtual personal assistants, and volumetric and holographic displays.

“Although we have categorized each of the technologies on the Hype Cycle into one of the digital business stages, enterprises should not limit themselves to these technology groupings,” added Burton. “Many early adopters have embraced quite advanced technologies, for example, autonomous vehicles or smart advisors, while they continue to improve nexus-related areas, such as mobile apps.”

Interested in learning more? You can check out Gartner’s entire report here.

[Image: Gartner]

Gartner’s 2014 Hype Cycle maps the journey to digital business

The journey to digital business is the key theme of this year’s Gartner Hype Cycle. As the Gartner Hype Cycle celebrates its 20th anniversary, the research firm highlighted that as enterprises set out on the journey to becoming digital businesses, identifying and employing the right technologies at the right time will be critical. In their latest report, Gartner crowned the Internet of Things and Natural-Language Question Answering as the two most hyped technologies with both expected to reach their respective “plateaus of productivity” (when they are will become mainstream).

Gartner’s 2014 Hype Cycle special report provides strategists and planners with an assessment of the maturity, business benefit and future direction of more than 2,000 technologies, grouped into 119 areas. Among the new Hype Cycles this year include Digital Workplace, Connected Homes, Enterprise Mobile Security, 3D Printing and Smart Machines.

“The central theme for this year’s Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle is Digital Business. As enterprises embark on the journey to becoming digital businesses, they will leverage technologies that today are considered to be ’emerging,'” explained Hung LeHong, Vice President and Gartner fellow. “Understanding where your enterprise is on this journey and where you need to go will not only determine the amount of change expected for your enterprise, but also map out which combination of technologies support your progression.”

According to industry analysts at Gartner, the IoT is forecasted to reach 26 billion installed units by 2020, up from 0.9 billion just five years ago, and will impact the information available to supply chain leaders and how the supply chain operates, depending on industry. Gartner anticipates a 30-fold increase in connected physical devices by 2020, which will continue to create a network rich with information that enables supply chains to assemble and communicate in new ways.

However, the analysts have pointed to a lack of standardization in the area, as well as the changing nature of the technology itself, as a factor in why widespread adoption of IoT may take longer than anticipated. “Standardization (data standards, wireless protocols, technologies) is still a challenge to more-rapid adoption of the IoT,” Gartner’s Hung LeHong writes.

Highlighted on the Gartner road map to digital business, there are six progressive business era models that enterprises can identify with today and to which they can aspire in the future:

• Stage 1: Analog
• Stage 2: Web
• Stage 3: E-Business
• Stage 4: Digital Marketing: The Digital Marketing stage sees the emergence of the Nexus of Forces (mobile, social, cloud and information). Enterprises in this stage focus on new and more sophisticated ways to reach consumers, who are more willing to participate in marketing efforts to gain greater social connection, or product and service value. Buyers of products and services have more brand influence than previously, and they see their mobile devices and social networks as preferred gateways. Enterprises at this stage grapple with tapping into buyer influence to grow their business. Technologies included in the Digital Marketing stage range from software-defined anything and big data to virtual reality and gesture control.
• Stage 5: Digital Business: Digital Business is the first post-nexus stage on the road map and focuses on the convergence of people, business and things. The Internet of Things and the concept of blurring the physical and virtual worlds are strong concepts in this stage. Physical assets become digitalized and become equal actors in the business value chain alongside already-digital entities, such as systems and apps. 3D printing takes the digitalization of physical items further and provides opportunities for disruptive change in the supply chain and manufacturing. The ability to digitalize attributes of people (such as the health vital signs) is also part of this stage. Even currency (which is often thought of as digital already) can be transformed (for example, cryptocurrencies). Digital Business technologies range from enterprise 3D printing and bioprinting systems to wearable user interfaces and connected homes.
• Stage 6: Autonomous: Autonomous represents the final post-nexus stage. This stage is defined by an enterprise’s ability to leverage technologies that provide humanlike or human-replacing capabilities. Using autonomous vehicles to move people or products or using cognitive systems to write texts or answer customer questions are all examples that mark the Autonomous stage. Technologies that fall within the Autonomous category include virtual personal assistants and smart robots to biochips and autonomous vehicles.

“Although we have categorized each of the technologies on the Hype Cycle into one of the digital business stages, enterprises should not limit themselves to these technology groupings,” LeHong said. “Many early adopters have embraced quite advanced technologies, such as autonomous vehicles or smart advisors, while they continue to improve nexus-related areas, such as mobile apps – so it’s important to look at the bigger picture.”

From home automation and smart metering to wearables and other IoT applications, a new generation of embedded products will increasingly power our lifestyle, as depicted by the Hype Cycle. Atmel is making it easier for designers to create a more intelligent, more connected world through its recently-unveiled Atmel® | SMART™ brand of ARM-based microcontrollers and expanded SMART portfolio. These solutions include embedded processing and connectivity — as well as software and tools — designed to make it faster and more cost-effective to bring smart products to market. Atmel | SMART MCUs combine powerful 32-bit ARM cores with industry-leading low-power technology and intelligent peripherals.

To explore the latest emerging technologies, you can access Gartner’s entire “Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies 2014” report here.

1:1 interview with Rob van Kranenburg (Part 1)

1:1 Interview conducted by Atmel’s Tom Vu with Rob van Kranenburg, IoT-A Stakeholder Coordinator, Founder of Council, and Adviser to Open Source Internet of Things, osiot.org.

TV: Why IoT-A? There are a multitude of IoT consortiums important to forging the progress of this next era of connective technology. Why is it important to the general business and mainstream? Why so many consortiums? Will it eventually roll up to one?

RvK: In systemic shifts the next normal is at stake. Of course you have to believe that IoT is a systemic shift first. Paradoxically, it is precisely the fact that we see so many contenders and consortia – no one wants to miss out or be left behind – that IoT is moving from being a vision to a business proposition. The success of the device as a standard – the Steve Jobs approach to controlling hardware, software, connectivity, app store; what goes in and what goes out and who it is friends with – has been an eye opener.

Patrick Moorhead writes in his Forbes piece that “the stunning success of smartphones, followed by similar success for tablets, has pushed the standardization opportunities for next generation infrastructure into play for the top tier of visionary companies”¹, listing among others IBM Smarter Planet, Cisco’s Internet Business Solutions Group, Google, IPSO Alliance, ARM, International M2M Council, IoT-A (Internet-of-Things Architecture), and Intel’s Intelligent Systems Framework (ISF).  Software as a service, could only come into existence with the Cloud: “In the 90s, storage disks of less than 30GB capacity were incredibly expensive. Today, thanks to innovations in silicon technology, we are able to get high capacity storage disks at a nominal cost.”² In the early 2000s we see the first experiments with real-time feedback.

In an earlier post you mention Formula 1. In 2002 Wired published a piece on sailing and the America’s Cup: “We’re trying to find patterns, to see that one set of conditions tends to result in something else. We don’t know why, and we don’t need to, because the answer is in the data.” This a programmer talking, a programmer and a sailor: Katori is writing a program that crunches the measurements and creates a “wind profile number an implied wind,” a wind an implied boat can sail on, as sailing, so long an intuitive art, has become a contest of technology: “Sensors and strain gauges are tracking 200 different parameters every second and sending the information across Craig McCraws OneWorld’s LAN to its chase boats and offices. Then the info gets dumped into a Microsoft SQL database, where it’s sifted to pinpoint the effects of sail and hardware experiments. Unraveling all the input is, in the words of OneWorld engineer Richard Karn, “nearly impossible.” And that’s not all: every day for the past two years, five OneWorld weather boats have headed out into the Gulf to harvest data.”³

I remember how struck I was by that notion of an “implied wind.” Before that notion there was the “real” and the “digital,” two concrete and separate worlds. You could argue that prior to that there was the “real” and the “surreal” or spiritual world. Large groups of people historically have been animists. To them objects do have stories, hold memories, are “actors.” Things are alive in that vision. Introducing this notion of implied, it became clear that it was no longer about the relation between the object and the database, materialized in a “tag,” but that the relation itself was becoming an actor, a player in a world where you did not know why, and you could nor care less why or why not – you wanted to gather data. There is “something” in it.

Grasping this key paradigm shift, it then becomes clear that the stakes are very high. In 2001, Steve Halliday, then vice president of technology at AIM, a trade association for manufacturers of tagging (RFID) technology, interviewed by Charlie Schmidt claimed: “If I talk to companies and ask them if they want to replace the bar code with these tags, the answer can’t be anything but yes. It’s like giving them the opportunity to rule the world.”⁴ Since then the most publicized attempt to create one single architecture, an Object Name Server, is the story of the RFID standard called “EPC Global” -two standard bodies EAN and UCC merging to become GS1 in 2005. In a bold move that no regulator foresaw, they scaled their unit of data from being in a batch of 10,000 and thus uninteresting for individual consumers to that of the uniquely identifiable item.

TV: Gartner suggest IoT as a #4 business creation factor for the next 5 years. What are your thoughts? Is this true?

Credit: Image obtained from Gartner’s 2012 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies Identifies “Tipping Point” Technologies, Unlocking Long-Awaited Technology Scenarios

*****

RvK: Depending on how you define IoT, I would say definitely. Internet of Things influences changes in production (smart manufacturing, mass customization), consumption (economy of sharing, leasing vs ownership), energy (monitoring grids, households and devices), mobility (connected cars), decision making processes (shift to grassroots and local as data, information and project management tools come in the hands of ‘masses’), finance (IoT can sustain more currencies: Bitcoin, bartering, and again ‘leasing’) and creates the potential for convergence of the above shifts into a new kind of state and democratic model based on the notion of “platform.”

It is more an operation on the scale of: before and after the wheel, before and after printing/the book. In a kind of philosophical way you could say that it is the coming alive of the environment as an actor, it touches every human operation. The browser is only 20 years old – Mosaic being the first in 1993. The web has dramatically changed every segmented action in every sequence of operations that make up project management tools in any form of production and consumption. Because of this some people in the EU and elsewhere are trying to change IoT name-wise to something like Digital Transition. The Singularity is another way of looking at it. As a concept it is Borgian in the sense that the next big trends: Nano electronics and (DIY) biology are not in an emergent future realm as time to market could increase exponentially as they are drawn into being grasped within the connectivity that IoT is bringing.

Interested in reading more? Tune into Part 2 of Atmel’s 1:1 interview with Rob van Kranenburg. View Part 2  and Part 3

*****

¹ http://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2013/06/27/how-to-intelligently-build-an-internet-of-things-iot/?goback=%2Egde_73311_member_253757229

² http://www.ramco.com/blog/5-cost-effective-ways-to-store-data-on-the-cloud

³ Carl Hoffman, Billionaire Boys Cup. High tech hits the high seas in a windblown battle between Craig McCaw and Larry Ellison. Carl Hoffman sets sail with Team OneWorld in the race to take back the America’s Cup.http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.10/sailing_pr.html

⁴ Beyond the Bar Code – High-tech tags will let manufacturers track products from warehouse to home to recycling bin. But what’s great for logistics could become a privacy nightmare. By Charlie Schmidt, March 2001.http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/400913/beyond-the-bar-code/