Are You Ready to Live (and Invest) in the ‘ZigBee’ World that’s Almost Upon Us?
Submitted by EnergyTechStocks.com
To improve the rate at which healthcare workers wash their hands, researchers at the University of Iowa recently conducted a test in which workers wore small, pager-sized badges that wirelessly recorded their use of hand hygiene dispensers, with the data stored in the badges. Patients’ rooms were outfitted with small beacons that detected whether the worker had washed his hands before entering. Researchers found that hand-washing compliance surged as worker behavior changed.
Welcome to tomorrow. Before long, not just hand-washing but virtually every other aspect not only of healthcare but also energy production and consumption will be controlled wirelessly by sensors on or in every electronic device, including the human body and the plug-in hybrid electric vehicle parked in your garage.
The acronym for this world will be “ZigBee,” which is the name of the leading protocol scientists and engineers are using to develop the multitude of products that will seamlessly connect in this wireless universe.
Just as those hospital patients’ rooms were outfitted with small beacons, so too will be not just every home and office but every neighborhood. Every person will have a “virtual doctor” monitoring their health 24-7 as they move around the house, ready to automatically send an email warning to their actual doctor if something is awry. And when people go outside, their badges will wirelessly connect with devices mounted on utility poles that measure the air quality where they are standing. (Researchers are already conducting these sorts of neighborhood experiments.)
In a ZigBee world in which we know the quality of the air we are breathing from one minute to the next, and we can find out immediately if bad air quality is affecting our health, people simply aren’t going to put up with unhealthy levels of carbon dioxide and other air pollutants where they live and work. Under mounting political pressure, politicians will act to slash air pollution, forcing manufacturing methods to be reinvented around clean, nonpolluting energy sources, both onsite and centrally dispatched through a “smart” grid capable of storing and transmitting solar, wind and other green power sources on an as-needed basis.
Meanwhile, with every electronic device – from TVs to toasters – programmed to always operate using the least amount of power and at the lowest cost, energy efficiency will become an omnipresent part of people’s lives, saving them money as the nation saves by not having to build new fossil-fuel power plants . . . and maybe being able to shutter all existing coal-fired units, thereby eliminating the need to spend tens of billions of dollars on carbon sequestration.
Not just people, but their cars, too, will be wearing the sort of badge that those Iowa healthcare workers wore, in order to connect wirelessly with satellite and pole-mounted sensors that will better control traffic flow, thereby greatly improving fuel efficiency.
Investing in a ZigBee world is going to be a lot different than investing today. While many of the corporate winners are yet to be determined, in this early going investors might want to think about raising their stakes in the providers of ZigBee’s most indispensable component – wireless systems. Companies including Verizon Communications (Symbol VZ), AT&T Inc. (Symbol: T), Sprint Nextel Corp. (Symbol: S), and Deutsche Telekom AG (Symbol: DT) are probably worth a closer look if you’re a long-term investor.
