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Oura, Lenovo and Qualcomm Execs Discuss the Relationship between Heath, Foldable Devices and 5G
The tech industry is usually synonymous with change and innovation, but the past two years have been particularly significant. In 2020, the first smartphones with foldable screens hit the market, next-generation 5G networks reached the masses, and wearable devices have made great advancements when it comes to monitoring health. The COVID-19 pandemic underscored our reliance on technology for everything from working to socializing and staying in shape.
A virtual webinar hosted by Business Insider discussed these changes and what they could mean for the critical tech devices.
Business Insider: Fitness companies boomed over the past year. Everybody was finding new ways to track their health and stay in shape from home. I think companies like Oura, and Peloton were kind of at the forefront of this boom in fitness over the past year. Harpreet, what do you think are the long-term health and fitness trends that are going to stick around even after the pandemic, even when life does go back to some semblance of normality?
Harpreet Rai: Every corporation, every person, how you work was affected by the pandemic. It really put in perspective the impact of health and what it can have on our lives. Wearables can be a sort of the new warning lights for the body. What wearables can do is give continuous information on how you're doing the whole time. Five or 10 years ago, not every car had adaptive cruise control or had a backup camera or had different types of traction control, or even TPMS, tire-pressure [monitoring systems], that let you know if your tire is running low. What wearables have shown for the human body for health is that new sensors, new applications, can start to understand your health and can impact how fast you react to negative signs.
Insider: It's a really interesting time for laptops as lots of changes are happening, a lot of different innovations, especially that I really want to talk about right now is this shift to ARM processors, or processors that are built on the same basic architecture as the chips in our phones. Alex, can you to talk about this a little bit.
Alex Katouzian: It's not just an ARM-based solution. But the system-on-a-chip that goes around that ARM processor is what is really making a difference on the laptops. We've been working for the past four years with Microsoft, with Google Chrome and others to try to bring those types of SOCs to the market that are based around the ARM processor. But it's the whole integration in that system solution that allows the integration of camera, video, audio, AI functions. [It allows] all of them to be embedded in these devices that are designed originally for very low power functions to be placed in laptops and run the [operating systems] that normally would run on traditional PCs. Now they're available to the market and designs are flowing out. People are bringing all their work devices to the home. And for the first time, the IT managers inside of enterprises are telling consumers what to bring home and have that capability inside the house. And the PC, the laptop is becoming an even bigger communication device than the phone. Look at what we're doing today. We're on multiple-people calls all day long. High-quality based solutions are already built into that main system on a chip that allows the flexibility, the security, the long battery life, the performance and AI functions, and camera functions all to be integrated on one package, to bring that capability that all of us are used to on the phone now to the laptop.
Business Insider: ARM chips are really only one of the ways that laptops have been changing over the past year. One of the biggest changes is the introduction of foldable displays and screens that can bend and fold so that you can change the size of the display to fit your needs. And we've seen this a lot on smartphones, but now we're just starting to see this come to larger devices. Tom, I know Lenovo came out with its first foldable ThinkPad early last year, the ThinkPad X1 Fold, why can foldable displays be useful for larger productivity oriented devices like the ThinkPad X1 Fold.
Tom Butler: We've been working on this for the past four years in our labs, working on obviously refining and overcoming some of the challenges. But we had this mantra of carry small, use big. Because if you think about a foldable device, I can take a 13-inch laptop and then fold it down in half, and I've immediately gained a significant amount of portability, opening up new use cases. There are new ways to carry the device, use the device, compute with the device, but maintains the flexibility of going back to a full screen experience into that productivity mode.
Business Insider: Looking forward with health and wearable technology, it's kind of amazing how much data the devices that we wear on our wrists and on our fingers can gather about us. Harpreet, where do you think things are going in the next three to five years. It seems like wearables can already tell us a lot about ourselves and our health, but where do you think they need to improve? And what improvements do you think we'll see in the next three to five years?
Rai: Fitbit really was the one that brought broad step tracking to the scene. And that was sort of wearables 1.0: step tracking and broader activity tracking. Wearables 2.0 is shifting towards health in different ways. We started focusing on sleep. With an Oura ring, you can see significant changes a day or two or three before you feel sick. It also tells you about the type of sleep you are getting, segregating the sleep time into productive and non-productive hours. Samsung has been pretty active in talking about blood pressure and Apple has done the most around atrial fibrillation. Today the healthcare system is reactive; you go to the doctor after you have a heart attack, and no one's really going to get all the regular checkups at the cadence that we should. Wearables can fill that gap by moving more into health versus just steps and moving into a more preventative versus reactive healthcare system.
Business Insider: There's been a lot of talk about companies like Apple, Facebook, and Snapchat possibly coming out with augmented reality glasses and smart glasses. And I know there's also been a lot of talk over the past couple of years about how now that 5G is [going to] play a really big role in the development of these next generation devices.
Alex, since Qualcomm is a company that's involved in so many different types of computing devices, how will 5G help these devices come to fruition and become mainstream. And will smart glasses be a device that's as commonly used as today’s smartphone.
Katouzian: The consumer and the enterprise are moving towards five smart devices, including smart glasses and the smart PC, which will be connected. 5G plays a critical role by allowing all of them to be connected to the network securely and share things on the cloud. AR-based glasses will be the future. Even see-through VR glasses will be the future. Imagine, a device that is rectangular, and that's your viewing angle or your eyes are the viewing angle, and you interact with objects that are not there in reality. Other people will be able to interact with them. Multiple new use cases are going to start to come out. Your viewing angle on the PC will get larger. Your viewing angle on the device, the handset itself will get larger.
Today we are tethered because the smartphone is with you, and it's got a powerful communication capability through a 5G network and the technology that Qualcomm brings. In the future, 5G connectivity will be integrated into the glasses. We started Now, other devices from companies like Niantic are coming out with our XR2 chip sets and software in there.
Butler: As Alex said, having that ability to have digital content overlaid in the actual world that you're seeing. You can imagine, now working from home as many of us are, you can put on glasses and then have a multi-monitor experience that's private just to you. As we travel again, or if I'm in a cafe, I can have a private viewing of multiple screens of content securely. No one else can see anything I'm looking at. That really starts to open up a massive set of new use cases that don't exist today whatsoever. There's no way to build something out like that. As Alex said, we're partnering with Qualcomm on bringing these out. Because that gives us that lightweight compute again in a tethered state, as we talk about right now. But ultimately, we're building to a model that becomes a lightweight set of glasses that you can wear comfortably for multiple hours of the day. Regarding proactive, predictive analytics, and part of what 5G gives us is a constant connected device. You never go dark, you never become disconnected from your network. Because we're ultimately seeing that all of us have three, four, or five-plus devices, which we call a digital wardrobe. We've got computers, we've got smart home, glasses, etc., and if you have all of these devices connected all the time, you've got that capability in the AI that's being built underneath to have the intelligence of understanding when you may have a problem with an application.
Insider: I'd love to hear from each of you, what is one thing that you learned during the pandemic that has changed the way that your companies do business?
Rai: Empowering people's lives and proving their potential through better health is really our mission. How these wearables sensors, can be used with other devices. That intersection of new data sets, validating that and proving that's a consumer. Working with independent research and academia and different partners, gave us further conviction that health is hard. More data is helpful. Prove that, work together with the industry in all different types and forms, and show that to consumers.
Katouzian: Before the pandemic, the workforce in our company met daily as we were always in the office, we talked to each other and counted on face-to-face communication as the way to do business. And then we were forced to go back into the house. Being at home, oddly enough, productivity actually started to go up. Believe it or not, we filed more patents during the pandemic than we had before.
You don't have to commute. You don't have to waste time in the hall, talking to people about stuff that's not pertinent. Those times actually add up, and communications and connectivity and having devices that you can work from anywhere and have that freedom to securely connect to others, and do your work, and do your play, and watch your videos, and be able to interact from anywhere was super important. Everyone's realizes that having cellular connectivity and having smart devices is the way to go. And that's where we see much, much more growth happening in the future. And I don't think it's going to change this to a certain degree that everyone's going to go back. I think people like the fact that you have a hybrid situation to work at home and go back to work a couple of days a week and meet with people. You're never going to take that connection between a face-to-face communication away, but you are able to do the work. You are able to continue. You are able to have much more.
The tech industry is usually synonymous with change and innovation, but the past two years have been particularly significant. In 2020, the first smartphones with foldable screens hit the market, next-generation 5G networks reached the masses, and wearable devices have made great advancements when it comes to monitoring health. The COVID-19 pandemic underscored our reliance on technology for everything from working to socializing and staying in shape.
A virtual webinar hosted by Business Insider discussed these changes and what they could mean for the critical tech devices.
- Harpreet Rai, CEO of Oura discussed the ways in which wearable devices are getting better at detecting changes in our bodies.
- Tom Butler, executive director, worldwide commercial portfolio and product management for Lenovo discussed the shifting of mobile devices toward foldable screens.
- Alex Katouzian, senior vice president and general manager of Qualcomm's mobile, compute, and infrastructure business, discussed how laptops are evolving and why 5G is critical to developing futuristic gadgets like smart glasses.
Business Insider: Fitness companies boomed over the past year. Everybody was finding new ways to track their health and stay in shape from home. I think companies like Oura, and Peloton were kind of at the forefront of this boom in fitness over the past year. Harpreet, what do you think are the long-term health and fitness trends that are going to stick around even after the pandemic, even when life does go back to some semblance of normality?
Harpreet Rai: Every corporation, every person, how you work was affected by the pandemic. It really put in perspective the impact of health and what it can have on our lives. Wearables can be a sort of the new warning lights for the body. What wearables can do is give continuous information on how you're doing the whole time. Five or 10 years ago, not every car had adaptive cruise control or had a backup camera or had different types of traction control, or even TPMS, tire-pressure [monitoring systems], that let you know if your tire is running low. What wearables have shown for the human body for health is that new sensors, new applications, can start to understand your health and can impact how fast you react to negative signs.
Insider: It's a really interesting time for laptops as lots of changes are happening, a lot of different innovations, especially that I really want to talk about right now is this shift to ARM processors, or processors that are built on the same basic architecture as the chips in our phones. Alex, can you to talk about this a little bit.
Alex Katouzian: It's not just an ARM-based solution. But the system-on-a-chip that goes around that ARM processor is what is really making a difference on the laptops. We've been working for the past four years with Microsoft, with Google Chrome and others to try to bring those types of SOCs to the market that are based around the ARM processor. But it's the whole integration in that system solution that allows the integration of camera, video, audio, AI functions. [It allows] all of them to be embedded in these devices that are designed originally for very low power functions to be placed in laptops and run the [operating systems] that normally would run on traditional PCs. Now they're available to the market and designs are flowing out. People are bringing all their work devices to the home. And for the first time, the IT managers inside of enterprises are telling consumers what to bring home and have that capability inside the house. And the PC, the laptop is becoming an even bigger communication device than the phone. Look at what we're doing today. We're on multiple-people calls all day long. High-quality based solutions are already built into that main system on a chip that allows the flexibility, the security, the long battery life, the performance and AI functions, and camera functions all to be integrated on one package, to bring that capability that all of us are used to on the phone now to the laptop.
Business Insider: ARM chips are really only one of the ways that laptops have been changing over the past year. One of the biggest changes is the introduction of foldable displays and screens that can bend and fold so that you can change the size of the display to fit your needs. And we've seen this a lot on smartphones, but now we're just starting to see this come to larger devices. Tom, I know Lenovo came out with its first foldable ThinkPad early last year, the ThinkPad X1 Fold, why can foldable displays be useful for larger productivity oriented devices like the ThinkPad X1 Fold.
Tom Butler: We've been working on this for the past four years in our labs, working on obviously refining and overcoming some of the challenges. But we had this mantra of carry small, use big. Because if you think about a foldable device, I can take a 13-inch laptop and then fold it down in half, and I've immediately gained a significant amount of portability, opening up new use cases. There are new ways to carry the device, use the device, compute with the device, but maintains the flexibility of going back to a full screen experience into that productivity mode.
Business Insider: Looking forward with health and wearable technology, it's kind of amazing how much data the devices that we wear on our wrists and on our fingers can gather about us. Harpreet, where do you think things are going in the next three to five years. It seems like wearables can already tell us a lot about ourselves and our health, but where do you think they need to improve? And what improvements do you think we'll see in the next three to five years?
Rai: Fitbit really was the one that brought broad step tracking to the scene. And that was sort of wearables 1.0: step tracking and broader activity tracking. Wearables 2.0 is shifting towards health in different ways. We started focusing on sleep. With an Oura ring, you can see significant changes a day or two or three before you feel sick. It also tells you about the type of sleep you are getting, segregating the sleep time into productive and non-productive hours. Samsung has been pretty active in talking about blood pressure and Apple has done the most around atrial fibrillation. Today the healthcare system is reactive; you go to the doctor after you have a heart attack, and no one's really going to get all the regular checkups at the cadence that we should. Wearables can fill that gap by moving more into health versus just steps and moving into a more preventative versus reactive healthcare system.
Business Insider: There's been a lot of talk about companies like Apple, Facebook, and Snapchat possibly coming out with augmented reality glasses and smart glasses. And I know there's also been a lot of talk over the past couple of years about how now that 5G is [going to] play a really big role in the development of these next generation devices.
Alex, since Qualcomm is a company that's involved in so many different types of computing devices, how will 5G help these devices come to fruition and become mainstream. And will smart glasses be a device that's as commonly used as today’s smartphone.
Katouzian: The consumer and the enterprise are moving towards five smart devices, including smart glasses and the smart PC, which will be connected. 5G plays a critical role by allowing all of them to be connected to the network securely and share things on the cloud. AR-based glasses will be the future. Even see-through VR glasses will be the future. Imagine, a device that is rectangular, and that's your viewing angle or your eyes are the viewing angle, and you interact with objects that are not there in reality. Other people will be able to interact with them. Multiple new use cases are going to start to come out. Your viewing angle on the PC will get larger. Your viewing angle on the device, the handset itself will get larger.
Today we are tethered because the smartphone is with you, and it's got a powerful communication capability through a 5G network and the technology that Qualcomm brings. In the future, 5G connectivity will be integrated into the glasses. We started Now, other devices from companies like Niantic are coming out with our XR2 chip sets and software in there.
Butler: As Alex said, having that ability to have digital content overlaid in the actual world that you're seeing. You can imagine, now working from home as many of us are, you can put on glasses and then have a multi-monitor experience that's private just to you. As we travel again, or if I'm in a cafe, I can have a private viewing of multiple screens of content securely. No one else can see anything I'm looking at. That really starts to open up a massive set of new use cases that don't exist today whatsoever. There's no way to build something out like that. As Alex said, we're partnering with Qualcomm on bringing these out. Because that gives us that lightweight compute again in a tethered state, as we talk about right now. But ultimately, we're building to a model that becomes a lightweight set of glasses that you can wear comfortably for multiple hours of the day. Regarding proactive, predictive analytics, and part of what 5G gives us is a constant connected device. You never go dark, you never become disconnected from your network. Because we're ultimately seeing that all of us have three, four, or five-plus devices, which we call a digital wardrobe. We've got computers, we've got smart home, glasses, etc., and if you have all of these devices connected all the time, you've got that capability in the AI that's being built underneath to have the intelligence of understanding when you may have a problem with an application.
Insider: I'd love to hear from each of you, what is one thing that you learned during the pandemic that has changed the way that your companies do business?
Rai: Empowering people's lives and proving their potential through better health is really our mission. How these wearables sensors, can be used with other devices. That intersection of new data sets, validating that and proving that's a consumer. Working with independent research and academia and different partners, gave us further conviction that health is hard. More data is helpful. Prove that, work together with the industry in all different types and forms, and show that to consumers.
Katouzian: Before the pandemic, the workforce in our company met daily as we were always in the office, we talked to each other and counted on face-to-face communication as the way to do business. And then we were forced to go back into the house. Being at home, oddly enough, productivity actually started to go up. Believe it or not, we filed more patents during the pandemic than we had before.
You don't have to commute. You don't have to waste time in the hall, talking to people about stuff that's not pertinent. Those times actually add up, and communications and connectivity and having devices that you can work from anywhere and have that freedom to securely connect to others, and do your work, and do your play, and watch your videos, and be able to interact from anywhere was super important. Everyone's realizes that having cellular connectivity and having smart devices is the way to go. And that's where we see much, much more growth happening in the future. And I don't think it's going to change this to a certain degree that everyone's going to go back. I think people like the fact that you have a hybrid situation to work at home and go back to work a couple of days a week and meet with people. You're never going to take that connection between a face-to-face communication away, but you are able to do the work. You are able to continue. You are able to have much more.
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