Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Tom Bianculli, Vice President of Technology Office at Zebra Technologies (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You’re saying that this is something that is in pilot.

Tom Bianculli: It’s not in commercial deployment, but two of the top five freight carriers in the world are trailing it.

Sramana Mitra: Any other use case that you want to present?

Tom Bianculli: There’s one in the healthcare space that I can talk about. It might be worth mentioning about the strategy. We are focused on instrumenting devices and getting data back. Think about this as Smart labels, Smart tags, Smart bracelets. This is similar to the quantified movement in the health wristband space, like what Nike did a while back.

The third category is smarter environments. Smarter environments are what I gave you examples of. In the case of smart freight where we need location and dimension data coming in real time. That’s the way we’re thinking about it. When you say, “Do you have an IoT business?” Our IoT business is to invest in all three of those areas in a horizontal way in order to serve the needs of the vertical markets that I described in specific use cases.

Just an additional backdrop, in healthcare there are interesting things happening. We have the number one market share position in healthcare wristbands. When you go to the hospitals and you get a wrist band, that will typically be a Zebra wrist band. This is online. We just recently spoke with Congress on healthcare IoT. If you Google healthcare IoT, my name, or Zebra, that will come up. We spoke about this in detail with Congress.

The notion is to say, “Instead of it just being a printed tag with machine-readable information, it actually becomes an active tag.” There’s active electronics on the tag that enables the patient to be tracked. In the case of really critical situations like Cardiology or Neurology, it takes to treat the patient from the moment they reach the emergency room to get a cardiac catheterisation, and that time is extremely important to the probability of them making a full recovery.

We have deployed these smart digital wristbands at Leiden University that actually have a radio on them. As the patient moves through the workflow, the wristband is able to communicate where it’s currently located. That data gets time-stamped and sent to the cloud. In this case, it’s being sent to our Zatar cloud platform. That’s our Internet of Things platform. Zatar is a play on words between zebra and avatar. Avatar is just a digital representation of a physical object. In this case, the physical object is the wrist band or the patient that we’re creating a digital representation of in the cloud.

In this case, Leiden University has been able to capture door to balloon time. That’s the time from when I hit the emergency door to when the balloon is inflated in a cardiac situation. They use that data to help drive better efficiencies. We have two other hospitals in the Netherlands who are deploying it as well.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Tom Bianculli, Vice President of Technology Office at Zebra Technologies
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