Understanding Any Human Motion Anytime, Anywhere on IBM Bluemix

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When healthy individuals stumble or fall, they can take great solace knowing they can lift themselves back up again. But for the elderly, disabled, or sick, this simple act may not be so easy.

To improve citizen vitality and well-being, businesses in the wearable tech industry are designing devices with motion sensors to address multiple mobility concerns. For athletes, this could mean using an exercise wrist band to gather data that measures individual performance, power and speed. For caregivers, this could mean providing seniors with a monitoring device that detects a sudden collapse.

At Kiwi, our goal is to move beyond simple activity tracking, and to do so, we’ve developed new data and analytics capabilities to help advance the functionality of motion-sensing technology. Using an advanced motion recognition platform, our software can help businesses capture any gesture – including arm and leg movements – on any device or sporting equipment to adapt to a user’s specialized requirements.

Through Bluemix, IBM’s cloud platform, data and analytics are collected through our unique motion recognition software, and integrated with artificial intelligence to help wearable devices better understand human gestures at an extremely detailed level. Much like the human brain, this software can learn and adjust to a user’s distinctive motion profile to detect different aspects of his or her movements.

Once personalized motion patterns are identified, our technology can then determine paths of movements, compare gestures against ideal forms and track consistency. This allows us to design and deliver motion-sensing technology that can be used by device manufacturers across multiple sectors, including healthcare, sports and leisure.

Our vision is to use the combined power of cognitive, analytics and cloud to make wearable devices useful across multiple aspects of life. By rotating your wrist, you can control your smartphone playlist or home lighting; by swinging a golf club, you can measure your performance compared to your last swing, and by simply eating or sleeping, you can easily keep tabs on your diet and health.

We’ve made the Kiwi motion recognition software available on Bluemix to enable athletic product manufacturers an easy, fast and affordable way to purchase and build our analytics and data-driven technology into their products. By using Bluemix to customize our software for each of our clients’ wearable innovations (which can range from watches to hockey sticks), we’ve been able to eliminate the complexity of building our motion-sensing technology into their designs, and drastically reduced the time needed to do so. In fact, we’ve been able to minimize proof of concept (POC) times by 75 per cent, enabling wearable developers to spend less time figuring out how their device will manage the vast volumes of data it will collect, and more time designing the innovations their device can achieve with that data.

As a growing startup, we also needed an affordable, instantly available cloud platform that wouldn’t saddle us with expensive licensing fees and time-consuming integration. Bluemix’s pay-as-you-go model not only delivered on these needs, but enabled us to offer clients affordable pricing; in turn allowing us to more rapidly market to and grow our expanding client base.

Today’s wearable devices are revolutionizing how we engage and interact with movement. With IBM Bluemix, we are helping businesses move wearable technology away from simply focusing on one single function, to capturing data and analytics through a variety of motion and gestures to make people happier, healthier and productive.
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Read more from Ali on his Kiwi blog.