WHY ROBOTS, TELEHEALTH AND OPEN EMBEDDED SYSTEMS ARE THE TRENDS TO WATCH IN 2021

While we are collectively looking to put 2020 as far behind us as possible, 2021 and beyond will be influenced by technological advances that have been prioritized and accelerated during the ongoing pandemic. Robots proliferating beyond the factory floor, doctors assessing your health regardless of location, and finally, the pendulum will swing from the cloud toward increasing the openness of embedded systems. Xilinx looks ahead at 2021.

Robots will proliferate beyond the factory floor and into our shops and communities as businesses seek to replace workers worried about close proximity to one another and to reassure consumers about health and safety protocols. Autonomous robots will handle things like food preparation, security patrol, cleaning and disinfection, and home delivery.

“We’ll also see an acceleration of robots in retail and hospitality, to handle tasks like inventory checks, social distancing, hotel check-in, customer service, and inventory management – all without requiring as many human workers on-site”, says Susan Cheng, Marketing Manager, Industrial Vision at Xilinx.

Robots also promise to add significant value when paired with humans, playing to the strengths of each. For example, a mobile security robot could scout out dangerous situations to confirm a situation is safe for human security officers. These human officers could then interact with individuals with a level of sensitivity that robots may never be able to achieve.

The pandemic is going to accelerate the development and adoption of wide-ranging technology around wireless communications, security protocols and artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance remote patient monitoring, point-of-care solutions and telehealth.

On telehealth, Subh Bhattacharya, Lead, Healthcare & Sciences at Xilinx predicts that “telehealth including remote monitoring, wireless communications and video conferencing will account for more than one-third of all patient care within the next 5 years and more than half by the end of the decade”.

After the Covid-19 pandemic started, many remotemonitoring sensors and platforms, and the use of AI algorithms to manage patients remotely were cleared on a fast-track by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to help providers monitor Covid-19 patients remotely, thereby reducing the risk of exposure. The platform providers and major clinics are collaborating to develop digital bio-markers based on sensor data and combining it with existing patient databases to write AI algorithms to detect disease severity.

The adoption of such systems by major hospitals and clinics are thus rapidly on the rise. Since proof and adoption is increasing, we expect this will rapidly widen to include and monitor patients in many additional health applications like cardiac care and pulmonary care. Additionally, deployment of 5G wireless infrastructure and enhanced security protocols will make the systems higher performance and more reliable thus increasing adoption rates. Telehealth, remote monitoring and pointof-care are now, in general, more widely adopted and accepted by insurance providers as well.

The concept of Data Gravity, driven by the need for lower latency and higher levels of privacy, will require producers of embedded systems to carve out a userprogrammable area or open their systems entirely or risk falling behind the competition.

The first rule of real estate is location. Similarly, location plays a critical role in factory automation. The relative compute density of some embedded systems rivals what was found only in the cloud a decade earlier, but the location of the embedded system multiplies the value of computation due to the shelf life of critical data. These embedded systems, acting on data that it collected itself before anyone else has a chance to access it, are increasingly made open for additional business.

“Like a renter subletting a two-bedroom apartment, creators of embedded systems are enabling their customers to develop and deploy proprietary apps on their embedded hardware systems for customized processing near the analogue-digital boundary”, says Chetan Khona, Director, Industrial, Vision, Healthcare & Sciences at Xilinx. “Examples of this paradigm include the IDS NXT embedded vision cameras and the Bosch Rexroth ctrlX factory automation controllers and more will surely come in 2021”.

Regardless of whether your business is hospitality, healthcare, or factory automation, the key to building systems that can adapt for an uncertain future is to build them on a technological foundation that is itself adaptive. Adaptive computing devices, such as FPGAs and adaptive SoC devices, are like chameleons, not just for software, but also for hardware. In effect, adaptive compute technology can be reconfigured to become the optimal processor for the task at hand.

Perhaps the greatest benefit of adaptive technology is that it gives us some much-needed leeway in how accurately we have to predict the future. Change is the one constant, and the flexibility of adaptive technology can assure that today’s systems will be able to adapt to all but the most disruptive changes.

MV