Feature: Embedded
Today, the healtcare and wellness sectors provide many opportunities for evolving the electronics
Ensuring your innovations are
future-ready By Niall Gallagher, Electronic Systems Expert, PA Consulting
P
redicting the future of technological innovation is quite an art. It requires sharp analysis of trends and an intrinsic knowledge of emerging
social, scientific and technological advancements to, quite literally, forecast the future. The question is: what indispensable and revolutionary features will everyday products have that don’t exist today? At present, the difficulty of the task
is further compounded by the pace of change catalysed by the arrival of artificial intelligence (AI). AI poses a unique challenge for engineers and product developers seeking to create
22 May 2024
www.electronicsworld.co.uk
future-fit innovations that can remain relevant in the face of breakneck change.
Future devices Critically, systems and devices must operate within a hardware framework – typically an embedded platform – that can accommodate future developments. Embedded platforms can facilitate next-generation product development, even when the underlying features that differentiate the new product haven’t yet been created. It sounds like a chicken-or- egg situation, but consider the embedded platform as the primordial soup from which a diversity of innovations are formed, brought to life and evolved. The question is: what does this
framework look like when the features aren’t yet defined? At PA Consulting we develop platforms
for everything – from mass-market consumer products to highly-specialised medical appliances – and what helps us define the ‘nebulous’ is ‘innovation zonal thinking’. Whilst the exact features of the product itself might remain undefined, by thinking of the embedded platform as an innovation zone, it is possible to build an all-encompassing, multi-application platform. Tis is an approach commonly applied at our Global Innovation and Technology Centre in Cambridge, UK, where we help product developers create future-fit products. In practice, building a platform
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