Ford is finally ready to roll out over-the-air (OTA) software updates to its vehicles at scale. While Tesla and other automakers have offered OTA updates for years, Ford only delivered its first software updates to select Ford F-150 and Mustang Mach-E customers this year. But the automaker says it’s prepared to rapidly increase the number of vehicles capable of receiving software updates, with the goal of producing 33 million vehicles with the capability by 2028. 

Ford, which is fond of using the phrase “Built Ford Tough” for its trucks, is playing it cool with the branding this time, simply calling its software updates “Ford Power Ups.” Over the past two months, Ford says over 100,000 F-150 and Mach-E customers have received their first OTA updates. And there will be more to come, including owners of the new Ford Bronco. The automaker is preparing a major update later this year that will include Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant. 

With this new update, Ford owners can ask Alexa for a weather update, play music, find the nearest gas station, or provide directions to their favorite destinations. Over 700,000 vehicles in the US and Canada will be eligible for the Alexa update this year, with “millions” more added over the next few years, Ford said. 

This isn’t exactly new for some Ford owners. Customers with Alexa accounts have been able to mirror the smart home assistant in their cars via their smartphones’ mobile connection. This new software update, though, will “embed” Alexa inside the car’s operating system, allowing for a more integrated user experience. And Ford is offering three years of Alexa complimentary, after which subscription fees will kick in. 

Not all the updates will come for free. BlueCruise, the automaker’s “hands free” highway driving assist system, will be available later this year to select F-150 and Mach-E customers who have purchased the relevant software updates. 

Legacy automakers have struggled to catch up to Tesla, which has long been the leader in shipping over-the-air updates to its customers to change everything from its Autopilot driver help system to the layout and look of its infotainment touchscreen. The idea that a car can be updated similarly to how Apple or Samsung can upgrade or repair the software on a smartphone has proven to be difficult and elusive for most car companies.

Most car dealers are wary of OTA updates for fear of being cut out of the lucrative service and maintenance process. Basically, if you can fix your car with an OTA update, you don’t need to take it in to the dealership as often. And that means less money for them.

Ford said that most of the updates will be “virtually invisible” to its customers and require “little to no action.” Others will require a reboot of the vehicle’s operating system that can happen when it’s most convenient, like overnight. 

“It’s a total reversal of the ownership model where vehicles used to just get older,” said Alex Purdy, head of business operations. “Now Fords will actually get better over time.”
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Earlier this year, Ford announced that Google’s Android would power the infotainment systems in “millions” of its cars starting in 2023. That, along with the Alexa software update that will begin rolling out later this year, is proof that Ford is committed to “giving our customers the choice to stick with the technologies and brands they’re already using and love or to try something new,” Purdy said.

Amazon plans to expand its virtual health service benefit to all its U.S. employees this summer while also making it available to other companies.

Eighteen months ago, the tech giant announced it was piloting a new virtual health service benefit for employees and their families in the Seattle region called Amazon Care.

The service offers virtual visits, in-person primary care visits at patients' homes or offices and prescription delivery. The on-demand healthcare service enables employees to connect with medical professionals via chat or video conference, typically in less than 60 seconds, and eliminates lengthy wait and travel times to get medical attention, Amazon said in a press release.

Starting Wednesday, Amazon Care is available to serve other Washington-based companies. Beginning this summer, Amazon Care will expand its virtual care to companies and Amazon employees in all 50 states. Amazon Care’s in-person service will expand to Washington, D.C., Baltimore and other cities in the coming months, the company said.

Services include video care, in-app text chat with clinicians, mobile care visits, prescription delivery from a care courier and in-person care, where Amazon Care can dispatch a medical professional to a patient’s home for services ranging from routine blood draws to listening to a patient’s lungs.

Officials said Amazon Care will be able to help with urgent issues like colds, allergies, infections, minor injuries, preventive health consults, vaccines, lab work, sexual health services like contraception and sexually transmitted infection testing and general health questions. 

Patients also can access preventive care such as annual vaccinations, health screenings and lifestyle advice. The service also supports patients’ wellness needs including nutrition, pre-pregnancy planning, sexual health, help to quit smoking and more, the tech giant said.

Amazon and other companies are increasingly focused on the home as a site of care. The company joined with Intermountain Healthcare and Ascension along with other health systems and home care companies to form the Moving Health Home coalition, which aims to change the way policymakers think about the home as a site of clinical service. The group is lobbying Congress to make permanent changes to home health care reimbursement policies.

Amazon officials said the program has received positive feedback from employees as the service is uniquely focused on patients and their changing needs. During shutdowns forced by the COVID-19 pandemic, doctors’ offices were seeing fewer children for pediatric vaccines, so Amazon Care quickly adjusted its services to offer the vaccines in families’ homes, the company said.

Gina Baird, whose spouse works at Amazon, participated in the Amazon Care pilot program when her three-year-old daughter woke up at 2 a.m. with a terrible cough.

"Of course we were worried about COVID-19 and certainly did not want to go to an urgent care center or emergency room if we could avoid it,” said Baird in a statement in the Amazon press release. “Using Amazon Care, we were able to connect with a clinician in under a minute who provided medical advice that helped us get through the night. She also prescribed a medication that was delivered to our doorstep by 9 a.m. the next day. Thanks to Amazon Care, we were able to manage her illness without ever having to leave the house.”

Ashley Bennett, senior operations manager at Amazon’s fulfillment center in Kent, Washington, said the on-demand healthcare services offered by Amazon Care make her feel that she has more control over the system.

"It’s at my leisure. That’s power. I’m not waiting on someone else to show up on their schedule," Bennett said in a statement. 

Amazon has been rapidly expanding its reach in the healthcare space, most notably in 2018 with its acquisition of online pharmacy PillPack. In November, the tech giant launched Amazon Pharmacy, the long-anticipated online storefront that will enable customers to purchase prescription drugs online and have them shipped to their homes.

Amazon started an ambitious health tech startup, Haven, with JPMorgan Chase and Berkshire Hathaway in 2018, but that venture shuttered in January.
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The tech giant has instead pivoted to address healthcare costs by focusing on employee healthcare through primary care models. Amazon teamed up with trendy tech-enabled primary care group Crossover Health to launch health centers in five major regions—Dallas-Fort Worth, Phoenix, Louisville, Detroit and two California metro areas—to serve Amazon employees and their families.

Non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, are topping the latest cryptocurrency news. Understand what NFTs are, how they’re transforming digital art and content into valuable assets, and other use cases for NFTs.

A fungible asset refers to an asset that is interchangeable with any other like unit of that asset. For example, one bitcoin (BTC) is the same as any other bitcoin in circulation – the case is the same with dollars or euros. Fungible assets are also divisible, meaning someone can fractionally break them up into smaller units that share the same properties. Fungible assets are essentially indistinguishable from one other. These traits are key for any asset to be viable as a payment mechanism. 

Non-fungible tokens are crypto tokens that are indivisible and unique. While NFTs are built on smart contracts just like cryptocurrencies, NFT contracts contain specific information that makes each NFT different from the next. In this way, one NFT cannot be interchanged with another NFT, and the whole cannot be broken down into smaller units and used. These traits denote non-fungibility, hence the name NFT.

NFTs appear most often on the Ethereum blockchain. Each token signifies ownership of a digital asset, though they are also marketed as representing portions of real-world assets as well. NFTs are typically built with the ERC-721 token standard. This standard outlines a minimum set of features that each non-fungible token should possess, but it does not limit potential extra attributes of NFTs.

As the latest hype to hit the Internet, NFTs are making some individuals millions of dollars. This phenomenon hit new heights with the recent sale at Christie’s of the digital artist Beeple’s work entitled ‘The First 5000 Days’ for $69 million and brought digital art to the attention of the mainstream. Another example is Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey’s first tweet. As an NFT on blockchain, it sold for almost $3 million.

NFTs could one day be used to record anything from ownership of our homes to our birth certificates, and already there are countless examples of eccentric-sounding tokenization attempts (a token of your family tree, anyone?).

Ownership of an NFT, evidenced by an immutable, cryptographically secured record on the blockchain, is taken as proof by others in the crypto sphere (and in the real world?) that you are the owner of that underlying asset, like a digital certificate of title or stamp of authenticity. This record of ownership can be found on the blockchain, while the digital asset itself is stored on a non-cryptographically secured, separate server owned by a host platform.

Rare or Unique Objects. NFTs are provably scarce assets. Each non-fungible token contains computerized code that verifies it is the only asset with its specific digital identity. This all-important characteristic is useful for creating unique digital goods and can even represent rare physical assets, whose provenance (historical record of ownership) can be tracked and cryptographically verified through its underlying blockchain protocol. The possibilities for exclusive and rare items that can be traded – such as digital art, collectibles, or game pieces – are endless. Platforms like Open Sea, Super Rare, and Nifty Gateway bring NFTs to an ever-growing consumer base.
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While NFTs still face challenges regarding interoperability and scalability, the technology has shown its utility in proving uniqueness, scarcity, and ownership for both digital and real-world assets. Already a staple in blockchain gaming and collectibles, NFT technology has proved to be a large growth sector of the blockchain industry as use cases expand into digital identity records and representation of scarce real-world assets.
 
“NFTs may make blockchain technology more popular in the eyes of the general public,” said Brian Comiskey, sr. manager of industry intelligence, Consumer Technology Association (CTA)®. “It may underscore a desire to increase more financial transactions (beyond crypto) for consumers and eventually be deployed on the enterprise side for applications like secure cloud storage.”

Apple is working on technology to detect a user's blood pressure using neural networks and seismocardiogram data, negating the need for a blood pressure cuff.

According to a patent application published Thursday, a wearable device, potentially paired with Apple Watch, might one day be capable of monitoring a user's blood pressure without the need for any additional peripherals.

The patent application, titled "Interpretable neural networks for cuffless blood pressure estimation," explores the use of neural networks to estimate blood pressure using seismocardiogram data. Unlike an electrocardiogram, which relies on electrical signals to monitor a heart rate, a seismocardiogram measures the micro-vibrations produced by the heart beating.

There exist seismocardiogram devices small enough to be considered wearable, though these sensitive systems are typically placed over a user's sternum to measure minute vibrations in or near the heart. How Apple intends to deploy such a device was not discussed in the patent filing.

According to Apple's patent, the system would work by leveraging an individually pruned neutral network accepting a seismocardiogram as input. That neural network would then use the data to estimate blood pressure.

For example, Apple could create a baseline model by training the neural networks with seismocardiogram data and blood pressure measurements from a group of subjects. Using that as a baseline, the system could then prune the model for subsequent users. The initial dataset would be collected from users performing different sedentary activities.

From there, Apple contends that the neural network could be used to accurately estimate a user's blood pressure without a cuff. As the patent points out, the system could use the neutral network "to determine blood pressure based on accelerometer or gyroscope data," which are already present in Apple devices.

Current versions of the Apple Watch can be used to monitor and analyze different types of health data, including heart rates with an optical sensing system, heart rhythms via a built-in electrocardiogram or blood oxygen sensing on the Apple Watch Series 6. Since the Apple Watch release, Apple has been continually expanding the device's health toolkit, and Apple may be looking to build out a set of health-minded accessories. 

The patent lists Siddharth Khullar, Nicholas E. Apostoloff, and Amruta Pai as its inventors. Among them, Apostoloff has been named on a previous patent dedicated to facial analysis and emotion detection.
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This isn't Apple's first patent focused on blood pressure monitoring. In 2020, the company filed a patent application for an Apple Watch-supported system that could use pulse transit time to measure blood pressure. Another system could use pressure sensor data, and Apple has explored how to monitor blood pressure without a cuff in the past.

The City of Las Vegas is home to 650,000 residents, with the greater Las Vegas area attracting 42 million annual visitors. The City of Las Vegas, working with technology and business solutions provider NTT, has expanded its efforts to become a smarter city and provide safe, reliable, and efficient civic technology that stimulates economic growth and offers better experiences for its residents and visitors.

City officials are seeking to improve interoperability among all public service sectors through open-source data sharing and real-time data analytics. They have deployed various tech solutions in the past two years that have already changed city safety.

The city’s smart city charter focuses on six major areas:

• Public Safety: Solutions should better inform first responders and decrease response times.
• Economic Growth: Infrastructures will promote new business models and lead to new job opportunities.
• Mobility: New connected vehicle infrastructure and data analytics will enable safer, more reliable, and energy-efficient mobility options.
• Education: Expanding collaboration with universities will support education initiatives and prepare the future workforce.
• Social Benefit: Programs for underserved communities will help establish demographic equity.
• Health Care: Connected and intelligent medical devices will encourage a broader view of well-being.

In this article, we will focus mainly on public safety initiatives and also touch on some social benefits.

Improving Safe Mobility. This pilot project was designed to decrease traffic congestion and help city officials address the problem of drivers accidentally driving the wrong way on streets. Sensors using lidar placed at various streets in Las Vegas could detect collisions, near misses, how many times cars went the wrong direction, and even resulting decreases in congestion after roadway improvements.

Edge data centers can quickly process and analyze massive amounts of data and send back near real-time alerts and suggestions for traffic control, amber alerts, and more. The connected data from all over Las Vegas streets also helps first responders react more quickly.

Through the pilot program, wrong-way driving was reduced by around 40%.

Expanding to Smart Park Initiative. Following an earlier trial at two park locations, Las Vegas has started expanding its smart park initiative to 12 more locations in a public safety effort. Deploying smart city technology in parks has allowed officials to monitor large crowds, gunshots, vandalism, breaking glass, and more.

Michael Sherwood, director of innovation and technology for the city of Las Vegas, said that understanding how many people visit parks and which facilities they use can help improve maintenance and operations, inform decisions about expansion and services, and protect residents.

Remote monitoring in the parks can improve efficiencies for public safety personnel, too. If sensors detect a visitor in the park after closing hours, automated recordings and remote systems can address the person before alerting officials.
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As Las Vegas continues to accelerate its smart city projects throughout the city, it’s learning that a connected society can directly benefit citizens and is looking ahead to how smart city technologies can extend further to stadiums, shopping malls, and manufacturing facilities.