The WT | Wearable Technologies Conference ASIA in Bangalore was a great success. With many senior decision makers from big industry players like TATA, software giants like Wipro and multinational cloud analytics providers like IBM, the whole WT value chain was present. We prepared a short recap of our first-ever event in India to keep you posted on what took place at the WT | Wearable Technologies Conference, Bangalore.

Christian Stammel, CEO of WT | Wearable Technologies, kicked off the proceedings with great insights into the WT Ecosystem and the application of wearables in different domains and verticals. This was well-received by the audience who also got a flavor of the ‘Smart Patch’ roadmap that is about to grow well in the near future.

Sridhar Sudarshan (CTO, IBM Watson Partnership) had a great presentation on the applicability of deep learning techniques on the data that is received from wearables. The talk featured IBM Watson and Watson IoT Platform offerings that extend the power of cognitive computing to connected devices — such as wearables, hearables, implantables and injectables. Several industries like healthcare, transportation, safety, factories etc are likely to benefit from this IoT transformation.

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This Keynote was followed by healthcare themed presentations : the experiences of WIPRO in developing the AssureHealth and Assurecare platforms was well complemented by two start-ups, RetiSense and Terrablue. Not only could the start-ups look at plugging into platforms of IBM & WIPRO but they could also share the critical skills of ‘Design Thinking’ and ‘Stakeholder buy-ins’ that they had to overcome.

Soon after lunch (the spicy Indian variety ;-)), it was the turn of Ganesh S – Innovation Manager at TATA, one of India’s biggest companies – to talk about their innovative approach in introducing a factory safety wearable. This talk expounded the design thinking principles of ‘Empathy-Define-Ideate-Prototype-Test’ with a discussion on the deployment using LORA in the TATA steel factory. This was probably the first time that TATA presented the new wearable product in touchable form to the world through the WT platform after presenting the concept at the WT | Wearable Technologies Conference in San Francisco in July.

Following these product presentations, the key ecosystem players came together to talk about their offerings. Uday Dodla from Qualcomm presented the new Snapdragon Wear 2100 Platform and the NB-IoT designs that can help designers to quickly go from idea to product. Anandan (TÜV SÜD India) gave insights into how good design principles (GDP) need to be followed to enable easy certification of wearable products.

Jeff Katz (GEENY) illustrated the importance of having an open IoT platform for the WT ecosystem. Start-ups and corporates were quite curious about the applicability of GEENY’s platform especially since it was an offshoot of one of the popular mobile networks from Spain, Telefónica.

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The evening was rounded up well with one of the most important topics: Cybersecurity. Shashank (Sumeru Solutions), an “ethical hacker”, walked the informed audience as to what can go wrong with even a simple Bluetooth connectivity. Various techniques to guard against any attack through a wearable was discussed along with a lingering warning that no gadget can be 100% “fool-proof” – there can only be several barriers to overcome vulnerabilities that can creep into wearables.

The WT Conference was preceded by an IEEE Tutorial on IoT/WT using IBM WATSON, the previous day (7th September). WT | Wearable Technologies supported and curated the content and provided support for excellent speakers. This event saw some bubbling college grads and start-ups learning about the basics of the WT/IoT Technology from experts in these domains.

A big thank you goes to all contributors of #WTINDIA17!

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