IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine

In 2008, the emergence of the blockchain as the foundation of the first-ever decentralized cryptocurrency not only revolutionized the financial industry but proved a boon for peer-to-peer (P2P) information exchange in the most secure, efficient, and transparent manner. The blockchain is a public ledger that works like a log by keeping a record of all transactions in chronological order, secured by... View full abstract»

Bitcoin, the first cryptocurrency, has the ability to transmit and verify digital assets on the Internet without specific management entities. There are currently more than 1,500 cryptocurrencies with a market capitalization of more than US$480 billion. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies were built on blockchain technologies to prevent forgery and falsification while distributing transaction data ... View full abstract»

The winds of change are blowing toward the multibillion dollar global consumer electronics (CE) industry, which includes companies that are engaged in the manufacturing of smart devices to enable smartconnected vehicles, transportation, health-care systems, home automation, and smart industry in the smart-city network. The rapid increase in the number and diversity of smart devices connected to th... View full abstract»

Smart tourism is an important component of smart cities. However, in many cities, insecurity, safety, fraud, and the lack of availability of proper information about resources are the biggest hurdles toward independent mobility. These issues can be overcome via proactive participation of local citizens to help tourists as well as by cooperation between citizens, city administration, and tourists. ... View full abstract»

This article is a single-source introduction to the emerging concept of smart cities. It can be used for familiarizing researchers with the vast scope of research possible in this application domain. The smart city is primarily a concept, and there is still not a clear and consistent definition among practitioners and academia. As a simplistic explanation, a smart city is a place where traditional... View full abstract»

In this article, we provided a tutorial on MEC technology and an overview of the MEC framework and architecture recently defined by the ETSI MEC ISG standardization group. We described some examples of MEC deployment, with special reference to IoT uses since the IoT is recognized as a main driver for 5G. After having also discussed benefits and challenges for MEC toward 5G, we can say that MEC has... View full abstract»

The blockchain is emerging as one of the most propitious and ingenious technologies of cybersecurity. In its germinal state, the technology has successfully replaced economic transaction systems in various organizations and has the potential to revamp heterogeneous business models in different industries. Although it promises a secure distributed framework to facilitate sharing, exchanging, and th... View full abstract»

Blockchains and sensors installed on a vehicle could be combined to semiautomatically activate/deactivate car insurance coverage in an envisaged on-demand insurance scenario. We present a prototype that includes a mobile application (app) and a portable electronic device to be installed onboard. The mobile app lets the driver dynamically change the status of specific insurance coverage (in some ca... View full abstract»

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) has taken over the business spectrum, and its applications vary widely from agriculture and health care to transportation. A hospital environment can be very stressful, especially for senior citizens and children. With the ever-increasing world population, the conventional patient-doctor appointment has lost its effectiveness. Hence, smart health care becomes very impo... View full abstract»

We live in the age of After Google (AG), where information is just one click away and talking just one touch away. The near future of the AG age is the Internet of Things (IoT), where physical things connected over a network will take part in Internet activities to exchange information about themselves and their surroundings. In other words, the IoT is nothing but a computing concept in which ever... View full abstract»

In the last few years, we have witnessed an exponential growth in research activity into the advanced training of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), a field that has become known as deep learning. This has been triggered by a combination of the availability of significantly larger data sets, thanks in part to a corresponding growth in big data, and the arrival of new graphics-processing-unit (G... View full abstract»

The smart city has become a new trend of interest with recent developments in information and communications technology (ICT) and the Internet of Things (IoT). These technologies provide users with new ways to interact with smart cities, especially city data. Visualizing data is crucial for improving a city's planning and management. Currently, most cases of city data visualization are mainly impl... View full abstract»

Today's consumer virtual reality (VR) devices have reached a level of complexity that necessitates innovative solutions, interaction designs, and the potential for greater user immersion. For example, the advanced interaction website developer Leap Motion presented the following introduction of their groundbreaking VR device: "Until the rise of virtual reality, we lived on the edge of a digital un... View full abstract»

Cognitive consumer electronics (CE), the fastest-growing sector worldwide that is driven by machine intelligence and cognitive systems, is triggered and enabled by audio- and video-capturing devices, smart sensors, health- and fitness-monitoring devices, security and education electronics, and intelligent systems. Smart consumer sensors and cognitive systems are synergized through the Internet of ... View full abstract»

Modern consumer electronics (CE) devices have evolved such that human interaction with machines is ever more natural and effective. The forthcoming deployment of the Internet of Things (IoT) over the existing Internet infrastructure promises to expand this interaction by providing applications and services that allow the human-computer interaction to integrate an automated customization of everyda... View full abstract»

Current activities in the Internet of Things (IoT) are focused on architectures, protocols, and networking for the efficient interconnection of heterogeneous things, infrastructure deployment, and creation of value-added services. The majority of the IoT products, services, and platforms are supported by cloud-computing platforms. With the IoT being a multidisciplinary ecosystem, it is now being u... View full abstract»

This article presents an indoor positioning system based on camera and ultrasonic sensors mounted on a pair of glasses that is specifically designed for visually impaired individuals. The proposed system incorporates a recognition algorithm that is able to recognize certain color-coded markers with a detectable range of 15 m in real time on a quad-core embedded processor. In addition, microultraso... View full abstract»

In 2016, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued new guidelines regarding the use and prescription of opioids for the treatment of chronic pain [1]. Today, "the CDC recommends that opioids should not be the first line or only treatment for patients who present with chronic noncancer pain" [2]. Additionally, the National Institute on Drug Abuse suggests that cognitive-behav... View full abstract»

A health-care system gathers comprehensive physiological information and medical records, making its data more important than ever. For example, for years now, the National Health Insurance Administration (https://www.nhi.gov.tw/English/) of Taiwan has requested every doctor, whether in a medical center or private clinic, to upload the diagnosis result, treatment, and prescription. These anamneses... View full abstract»

The first wearables DevCon for developers of wearables was held in San Francisco 5-7 March 2014 and was greeted with great enthusiasm, with more than 1,000 people attending the three-day event. With the introduction of Google Glass, Epson Moverio, Pebble, and Fitbit, wearables have certainly captured the attention of many consumers and enterprises. While some of these wearables mainly provide a si... View full abstract»

Consumer electronics (CE) based on the Internet of Things (IoT) are playing a key role in boosting the global economy by improving quality of life and creating new markets, products, and research paradigms. This special issue provides a publication medium for articles that either review existing IoT-based CE devices, systems, and platforms or explore novel research paradigms such as smart homes an... View full abstract»

New emerging technologies in the field of multimedia, such as high dynamic range (HDR) and wide color gamut (WCG), challenge the performance of existing image and video data processing algorithms, especially in terms of visual data compression and its faithful representation. HDR and WCG offer the technological capabilities to capture and represent a scene with an extended amount of details in bot... View full abstract»

Increasing health awareness and rapid technological advancements have resulted in significant growth in an emerging sector: smart health care. By the end of 2020, the total number of smart health-care devices is expected to reach 808.9 million (646 million devices without wearables and the remaining with wearables) [1], [2]. This proliferation of devices is expected to revolutionize health care by... View full abstract»

A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a distributed set of sensors deployed to work together for collective sensing and possible data processing. A WSN can be used to monitor environmental behavior and structural integrity in a variety of application fields, thus becoming an integral part of the consumer electronics of smart buildings in smart cities. Due to ever-increasing population growth, along w... View full abstract»

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a network of physical things, objects, or devices, such as radio-frequency identification tags, sensors, actuators, mobile phones, and laptops. The IoT enables objects to be sensed and controlled remotely across existing network infrastructure, including the Internet, thereby creating opportunities for more direct integration of the physical world into the cyber wor... View full abstract»

This is the first installment of the new "Security and Privacy Matters" column in IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine. Security and privacy are always at the heart of everything that happens in the Consumer Electronics (CE) industry. This column aims to provide insight on various aspects of security and privacy in the CE industry. View full abstract»

The Consumer Technology Association (CTA) counts among its members companies that are integral to all parts of the automotive supply chain: from chip companies, including Intel and Nvidia, to tier 1 subsystem suppliers, such as Visteon and Mobileye, to car manufacturers, including Ford, General Motors, Nissan, and Toyota. The aftermarket suppliers, such as Sony, Kenwood, Pioneer, Alpine, and Voxx,... View full abstract»

Advanced driver assistance systems (ADASs) are accelerating the growth of infrared (IR) devices used in automotive applications. Some of these are well-known applications, such as ambient light sensing, steering wheel sensors, and rain sensors. However, many new technologies for ADASs, such as LIDAR, driver monitoring, adaptive beam, and matrix lighting, are still in the early evolution phase of t... View full abstract»

As we become more aware of the connection between emotional states and physical health, affective computing continues to rise as a field of interest. Affective computing uses both hardware and software technology to detect the affective state of a person. It is an active research area that has seen much growth in technology geared toward affective state analysis. Its origin is credited to Dr. Rosa... View full abstract»

New technologies in the field of neuroprosthetics and robotics are leading to the development of innovative commercial products based on user-centered, functional processes of cognitive neuroscience and perceptron studies. The aim of this review is to analyze this innovative path through the description of some of the latest neuroprosthetics and human-robot interaction applications, in particular ... View full abstract»

Virtual reality (VR) has been in the spotlight these past few years due to the commercial release of affordable VR headsets such as Samsung Gear VR, Oculus Rift, and HTC Vive. Although VR-related research has been developing for several decades and gradually expanding into numerous fields of science including various forms of therapy [1], [2] or education [3], once such technologies go mainstream,... View full abstract»

In this article, a review of commercial devices on the edge of the Internet of Things (IoT), or IoT nodes, is presented in terms of hardware requirements. IoT nodes are the interface between the IoT and the physical world (e.g., sensor nodes). To this aim, we introduce a wide survey of existing devices made publicly available for the further analysis of trends and state of the art. This data-drive... View full abstract»

Substantial ongoing research now uses smartphones as a research platform for various studies and interventions. With the aging population becoming a frequent focus of research, an increasing number of studies and projects attempt to develop technological interventions for the elderly population. The extent to which the elderly population (i.e., seniors) adopts and uses smartphones is not clear. Ma... View full abstract»

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a framework built as a network of trillions of devices (called things) communicating with each other to offer innovative solutions to real-time problems. These devices monitor the physical environment and disseminate collected data back to the base station. In many cases, the sensor nodes have limited resources like energy, memory, low computational speed, and commu... View full abstract»

Microsoft's Kinect wrist-worn sensor technology is capable of interpreting a user's wrist, palm, and finger motions [1] to control a computer or console. The infrared laser device sends messages to mobile phones and iPads to decode human body movements, resulting in the manipulation of digital files based solely on gestures [2]. This motion-controlled computing has the potential to reduce redundan... View full abstract»

ANC offers an effective, low-cost, lightweight, and compact solution to noise problems in audio and health-care products. As these products are used in noisy environments, audio-integrated ANC systems are essential for enhancing the audio quality and canceling annoying noise. In this article, audio-integrated ANC algorithms were briefly explained and several potential audio-integrated ANC products... View full abstract»

Consumer electronics devices are usually embedded where considerable consolidation of electronic components result in cost savings, miniaturization enablement, and higher reliability. An important factor in embedded electronic product operation, cost, performance, and power use is employing various memory technologies for content caching and buffering. There is a significant opportunity in the mar... View full abstract»

The field of consumer electronics (CE) has gone digital, inheriting all the security problems of the digital world in the process. The Internet of Things (IoT) class of CE devices is still in a very early adoption phase. Physical side channels are a bigger vulnerability for this class of devices than traditional security threats that exploit protocol, algorithm, or program weaknesses. Interestingl... View full abstract»

Reusable digital signal processing (DSP) intellectual property (IP) cores play a crucial role in numerous domains, including consumer electronics. However, optimizing DSP cores is crucial for the reduction of design area, delay, power, and so forth [1], [2]. Though several optimization techniques using evolutionary algorithms have been proposed, they incur design overhead and exploration time [1],... View full abstract»

Virtual reality (vr) will be a profoundly disruptive technology in the same way as the smartphone and the Internet. Like the smartphone, VR uses a new interface format (a head-mounted display and hand controllers) to provide much more intuitive and natural access to a computing device. Much like the Internet, it allows a new kind of worldwide communication-but this time with a natural human experi... View full abstract»

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are widely used by both academic and industry researchers to solve many long-standing problems in machine learning. There has been such a growth of research in this field, and it has been applied to so many varying problems, that it would be accurate to say that we may be living through the precursor of the singularity [1]. But regardless of one's views on artificial in... View full abstract»

This article describes a novel visual metaphor to communicate the sensor information of a connected device. The Internet of Things (IoT) aims to extend sensing and computing capabilities to every device. A byproduct of this is that even domestic machines become increasingly complex and more difficult to understand and maintain. View full abstract»

In this new era of online, on-demand, omnichannel retailing, many brick and mortar retailers are worried. This is not too surprising, given that physical stores in the United States are closing their doors at a record pace. As of early April 2017, closings had been announced for more than 2,000 retail locations since the start of the year. That's more than twice as many as at the same point in 201... View full abstract»

A current challenge in the development of autonomous vehicles is programming the ethics of their behavior. One way to explore ethical issues of safety and agency when an autonomous vehicle is put in a situation where it must choose between two outcomes has been to use the trolley problem, a moral dilemma documented by Prof. J.J. Thompson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology [1]. In the tro... View full abstract»

Automatic login is a commonly used feature of smartphones, because their small keyboards make it difficult to key in user credential information. However, this feature may pose a serious risk to smartphone users? privacy. The stored data for automatic login could be stolen by an attacker, resulting in identity theft. In this article, we demonstrate an execution of this attack in a systematic manne... View full abstract»

In today's world, many people feel stressed out from school, work, or other life events. Therefore, it is important to detect stress and manage it to reduce the risk of damage to an individual's well being. With the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT), devices can be made to detect stress and manage it effectively by using cloudbased services and smartphone apps to aggregate and compute larg... View full abstract»

Many people in leadership roles at work are also parents at home; and there are similarities between these two roles. How can we leverage what we learn from one role into the other? Here are a few practices that might be helpful to those in either role. View full abstract»

The term health care has a very wide scope that ranges from lifestyle and wellness to care for acute conditions. With the availability of digital accessories for monitoring basic biological functions, the potential for obtaining detailed data on the lifestyle, habits, and behavior of an individual exists. Such data can enable the diagnosis of the causes for a condition with higher accuracy. Recent... View full abstract»

Acquiring nutritional information before buying and eating food is crucial for making healthier choices and more educated selections. Therefore, there is a demand for electronic devices that can automatically access nutrition information. To help with this, we propose a novel augmented reality (AR)-based wearable food-monitoring system to make food nutritional information available and visible in ... View full abstract»

In 2010, the bluetooth special interest group (sig) published their Core Specification 4.0, including Bluetooth low-energy (BLE) technology, or Bluetooth Smart. This short-range radio breaks technical ground as it can run for years on batteries or scavenged power. Bluetooth Smart is a leading candidate to connect the Internet of Things. View full abstract»