The winners of this year’s Future Digital Awards for Technology & Innovation were announced.
This category recognises some of the most innovative and promising products across the consumer technology sectors of Digital Healthcare, Automotive, Smart Homes and Wearables. Juniper identified the cutting-edge applications, technologies and vendors that it believes will galvanise the industry in the years to come.
The winning vendors and products were as follows:
1. Smart Wearables
- Best Consumer Product: Winner – Vuzix AR-3000
- Best Platform/Technology: Winner – idOO born identity and NXP
Vuzix is a provider of video eyewear. Its AR-3000 smart glasses use innovative waveguide optical technology to deliver AR (augmented reality) smart glasses for both enterprise and consumer use.
idOO born identity is the result of a partnership between NXP, a global semiconductor manufacturer, and identity management company idOO, which offers a unique blend of anti-counterfeit measures and brand engagement tools for high value fashion, active wear and luxury goods.
2. Smart Homes
- Best Consumer Product: Winner – DigitalSTROM AG DigitalSTROM
- Best Platform/Service Offering: Winner – Amazon Alexa
DigitalSTROM AG is a German-Swiss company developing smart home technologies, enabling home automation using low cost components with no additional infrastructure.
Offering a natural language voice interface to the smart home, Alexa is a clear leader in smart home control. The service is platform agnostic offering wide reach, while the $100m Alexa developer fund set up by Amazon will ensure continued interest from the builders of the smart home ecosystem.
3. Digital Health
- Best Consumer Product: Winner – Neurometrix Quell
- Best Platform/Technology: Winner – CirrusMD CirrusMD
NeuroMetrix is a spinoff from the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, developing wearable medical technology. Quell is the first FDA-approved mobile treatment wearable for pain relief.
CirrusMD is an American company developing telehealth solutions. Its virtual care platform offers HIPAA-compliant messaging and video chats between patients and doctors, while integrating with EHR records.
4. Automotive & Telematics
- Best Consumer Product: Winner – Tesla Tesla Autopilot
- Best Technology/Service Offering: Winner – NVIDIA NVIDIA Drive PX
Tesla Autopilot offers one of the world’s first level 3 autonomous driving solutions, leveraging a multitude of sensors. Pushed as an OTA firmware update, its commercialisation has brought the industry one step closer to fully autonomous vehicles.
The NVIDIA Drive PX platform combines cloud-based machine learning with on-board multi-core GPU processing for ADAS applications. Offering a form-factor vastly scaled down from existing implementations, integration into vehicles via 21 OEM partners is likely to increase road safety.
5. Emerging & Disruptive
- Best Consumer Product: Winner – Blue Frog Robotics BUDDY
- Best Technology/Platform: Winner – Giesecke & Devrient Secure Industrial Visibility
Blue Frog Robotics’ BUDDY is a mobile home companion robot. With few competitors focussed as holistically on home management, its potential is further increased via an open platform for third-party developer input.
G&D’s Secure Industrial Visibility is an IoT unit management and security platform. The ability to obscure connected IP addresses alongside intrusion detection offers best-in-class security solutions, while feasibly any connected unit can be integrated, making for a huge addressable market.
CirrusMD collects Digital Health Platform/Technology Award
“CirrusMD is honoured to receive the Future Digital Award for Best Digital Health Platform/Technology. We appreciate the recognition by Juniper Research of our efforts to deliver a unique, integrated approach to telemedicine that makes virtual care work for where healthcare is going, particularly for payers and providers transitioning into value-based care models.” – Andrew Altorfer, Co-founder & CEO, CirrusMD
Blue Frog Robotics takes Best Emerging & Disruptive Consumer Product Prize
“It’s exciting for Blue Frog Robotics and BUDDY to receive this honour from Juniper Research, one of the world’s most highly-regarded consulting firms in the information technology space,” said Rodolphe Hasselvander, Blue Frog Robotics co-founder and CEO. “BUDDY is the robot for every one with endless possibilities thanks to his open source platform based on android and powered by Unity3D and we are pleased that Juniper has recognised him with this award.”
Giesecke & Devrient triumphs as Best Emerging & Disruptive Technology/Platform
“The award is an honour and a great signal to our clients that we have the right solution for Industry 4.0 security. The Internet of Things and Industry 4.0 are not just passing trends. Connected industry production has come to stay.” – Axel Deininger, Head of the Enterprise Security OEM division at Giesecke & Devrient
The awards were decided by a panel of expert judges based on a number of criteria including: product features and user benefits; innovation; commercial partnerships; commercial launches; certification & compliance; and, potential future business development. Steffen Sorrell, Panel judge and Senior Analyst at Juniper Research, said that: “The standard of entries this year was extremely high and highlight companies’ innovative and ground-breaking approaches taken to meet the challenges of today’s connected world.”
The complete list of award winners and ‘highly commended’ can be found at juniperresearch.com
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