GreenPeak used IBC to showcase the launch of a new ZigBee chip and Family Lifestyle cloud platform, but when RIoT sat down with CEO Cees Links, we found that the company is already planning for a future without ZigBee. Links was fairly nonchalant about the possibility that GreenPeak’s cloud platform wouldn’t be tied to ZigBee forever. But in the meantime the company presses on with its chip business.
GreenPeak is a major contributor to the ZigBee standard, as well as one of the leading manufacturers of ZigBee chips. It is currently shipping a million ZigBee chips each week, accounting for around a third of total ZigBee shipments. GreenPeak has now doubled its shipments and revenue for the third year in a row, with around $30 million in revenue to its name.
The company is leveraging its ZigBee sensors to get into the mHealth home monitoring market. The cloud-based Family Lifestyle platform is aimed at ensuring elderly occupants can be checked in on by their children, who might be concerned by their declining health – both mental and physical. But GreenPeak has taken a different approach than traditional monitoring systems, in that the platform doesn’t require cameras or wearable device to monitor a home’s occupants.
Instead, the system uses motion sensors connected via an internet gateway to a cloud intelligence, which monitors typical usage to recognize patterns in daily movements. Once the patterns are established, the cloud system can alert the person who wants to keep tabs on an elderly person, via an app on a smartphone that can also be integrated with social media platforms for more pervasive alerts.
An example implementation might look something like this; a motion sensor on the front door, a motion sensor outside the bed room door, one in the bathroom, one in the kitchen, and one attached to the fridge. This system could give a solid look at the movements of a person within a flat or home, but it does not require the occupant to wear a pendant or bracelet, which are often taken off and absent-mindedly not put back on again. Similarly, the system doesn’t use video cameras, so the occupant shouldn’t object on privacy grounds or fear of being spied on. This is being pushed as a relatively non-intrusive monitoring system that can help elderly relatives remain in the comfort of their home, safely and lowering the need to hire or provide specialist carers or social workers to perform the same monitoring task.
This system would be able to alert someone to the fact that their relative had gotten up in the morning but hasn’t opened the fridge all day (and is therefore forgetting to eat), or hasn’t been noticed in the home since they left for their usual shopping trip. Bathroom visits and sleep schedules could be checked too, and if a sensor was attached to the medicine cabinet, you could also perform a simple form of medication compliance checking. The small insights gained from a system like this are meant to provide peace of mind to those concerned about the welfare of a relative, all the while enabling that relative to live a little more safely inside their home – with oversight provided in a fairly non-intrusive way.
Unnamed service operators in Germany and China are currently trialing the system, and are expected to roll out the service later this year. GreenPeak says the next phase of the roll out will be aimed at monitoring young children and babies.
The other bit of recent GreenPeak news comes in the form of a new chip. The GP565 is aimed squarely at remote controls for the TV set tops that will likely become the central hub for smart home subscription services. The GP565 supports voice control and motion sensing, and uses the new ZRC 2.0 protocol (ZigBee Remote Control, fully backwards compatible). Its intended use is as a whole-home controller; one that leverages the large scale deployment of ZigBee chips in US set tops (all set tops since 2012 according to Links).
This use case relies on the set top acting as the smart home hub, or at least the link to a hub, but it is very similar to the approach taken by EchoStar’s Sage set top (see separate piece). In this implementation, the devices are configured by a central intelligence which also acts as the UI for the hub – the TV screen allowing users to see through their security cameras or navigate their lighting preferences, for example.
But the GP565 will enable both gestures and voice-input to navigate this UI, as well as support for legacy RF audio and visual equipment through the IR-RF Download feature. This allows the remote to control devices that were designed and manufactured before IoT became the buzzword it is today, and with any luck live up to its billing as a whole-home controller for every Thing in the house.
On the more in-depth technical side, the GP565 comes in two editions, with 120 kilobytes of flash memory and 8 kilobytes of RAM, or 240kb and 16kb respectively. It uses a 40 pin silicon footprint, with improved receiver sensitivity and output power according to GreenPeak.
But the most interesting topic of our conversation was the aforementioned IBC discussion with Links was on the future of ZigBee and GreenPeak. Links reaffirmed GreenPeak’s goal of providing the $5 10-year battery-powered ZigBee sensor, built around a $0.50 chip. And while business is good, Links noted that there is erosion in GreenPeak’s revenues that comes to somewhere around 10% per year. This of course prompted the question, what if ZigBee doesn’t win out in the smart home.
Links answered by comparing the smart home to buying a kitchen, noting that if you buy a designer kitchen you don’t think about the plumbing, but you do care that it works. As long as the pipes are shifting the water correctly, the maker or brand of the pipe doesn’t matter. Quite bluntly, Links admitted that if ZigBee was no longer the cheaper option, GreenPeak would quite happily move to where the value was – in the cloud system, where the water flows to.
So if ZigBee is someday not the best piping method, GreenPeak will be falling back to its cloud-based white-label Family Lifestyle smart home service, which will shortly begin testing the market. That’s quite a shift; from a silicon vendor to a service provider, and the CEO seemed remarkably unperturbed by it.
But Links is confident that ZigBee isn’t going to suffer such an ignominious defeat. When we put the threat posed by Z-Wave to him, he pointed out that GreenPeak alone ships more chips than the whole Z-Wave Alliance – which is based on proprietary technology from Sigma Designs and is not at all like the open(ish) standards favored by the ZigBee Alliance.
And Links then pointed toward the adoption of WiFi, a technology he was heavily involved in developing. He noted that had you told him 15 years ago that there would be ten WiFi devices in each home, he would never have believed it, and yet now it is almost commonplace in developed markets – making GreenPeak’s prediction of 100 ZigBee devices per smart home in 15 years seem rather conservative, once you go around counting the number of things you could potentially connect.
And when you start doing the math, with 600 million homes connected to the internet currently, and with that number set to grow over time, that’s a lot of potential smart homes to fit ZigBee chips and devices in. But regardless of the chips, it seems that GreenPeak is beginning to move into the area where the real value lies in the IoT – sitting in the cloud, connecting all the data that flows through the innumerable pipes.