Wearables Take Center Stage at Aug 5 Flash Conference

Santa Clara, Ca, July 21, 2014 – From smartwatches to wellness/apparel monitors and head-mounted displays, experts from the storage/technology development industries will discuss how rapidly the wearable device industries are moving from consumer curiosities to necessities during the 3:40 pm session Tuesday, August 5, at the Flash Memory Summit being held at the Santa Clara Convention Center.

“We’re quickly moving from clunky to chic and from casual to essential with smartwatches; and this is only the beginning of what we can expect from wearable technology in the months/years ahead,” said Bob O’Donnell, panel moderator and founder of TECHnalysis Research. “Experts from microprocessor, flash memory and integration/implementation firms will discuss some of the advances that are being made in smart sensors. Today, wearable devices go beyond fitness bands and intelligent/bulky watches and will set the stage for a new era of healthcare, communications and digital identity.”

The market is just in its infancy today; but within five years, it will represent a global market worth over $10 billion including smartwatches, smart glasses such as Epson’s new Moverio and health and fitness bands. O’Donnell said that consumer wearables will move beyond simple fitness applications and start to experiment with more extensive health and medical record tracking such as Epson Pulsense continuous heart rate activity tracker as well as digital identification and authentication for mobile payments.

An area of keen interest to the panelists is the rapid advances and potential for intelligent wearables for health and biometrics functions (reading heart rate, measuring blood pressure, etc.). “The market has had so many ups and downs since wearables were first introduced as curiosities,” O’Donnell observed. “In talking with the panelists, they see a market with solid potential, but lots of questions as well. With the right kind of software, these devices can change the way people proactively take care of their own wellness and possibly even communicate with their healthcare professional and their insurance company more efficiently, more effectively.”

O’Donnell said this was just one of the application areas panelists will be exploring on August 5 at the Flash Memory Summit. Experts joining him on the stage will be Ajith Dasari, Vice President of Platforms and Customer Engineering; Anna Jen, Director, New Ventures & New Products, Epson America, Inc;. Ineda Systems; Karin Werder, Director of Product Marketing for SanDisk’s iNAND embedded flash devices; and Brian Hernacki, Chief Architect, Intel New Devices, Intel Corp.

The panel will also be discussing the many opportunities for sensor-laden, voice-activated devices that will be available in the near future. For example, there will be an exploration of wearables that will monitor respiration, body position, brain activity, bloodless glucose monitoring and other breakthroughs that are being explored.
In addition to the wearables panel session, there will be conference meetings featuring end users, solution developers, designers and application leaders in the consumer, mobile, 4K video content production, healthcare, enterprise and other market areas.

The 9th Annual Flash Memory Summit will also feature keynote speakers from Alibaba, Samsung, Dell, Microsoft, SanDisk, IBM, Fusion-io and other industry leaders. More than 100 information-packed sessions will have presentations by leading experts and will include complete coverage of SSDs, Controllers and the very latest in advanced technologies.

The three-day event will include plenaries on 3-D flash, forums on NVMe, architectures, enterprise SSD, enterprise storage design/applications and performance measurement. There will be more than a dozen tutorials on reliability, enterprise SSD selection, software-defined storage and enabling Big Data applications. To help attendees stay abreast of the fast-moving industry there will also be a series of hands-on laboratories on custom hardware, NVMe compliance, cloud storage and non-volatile DIMM.