This year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2020 featured a range of marvals enabled by electronic technologies covering application areas from smart cities, AI edge intelligence, body haptics, security systems, real-time accident reports, uncooled thermo cameras, wearables and more.

Here are the top 10 products and technologies that piqued the interest of the Design News editorial staff.

Smart Cities

Why do major Japanese car manufacturers like to build smart homes and now cities? Several years ago, Honda built a zero-net energy smart home in partnership with UC-Davis. At this year’s CES, Toyota announced it will build a smart city to test their AI, robots and self-driving cars. Toyota’s Woven City will be built at the foothills of Mt. Fuji in Japan. The city will be the world’s first urban incubator dedicated to the advancement of all aspects of mobility, claims Toyota.

The project is a collaboration between the Japanese carmaker and the Danish architecture firm Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG). Houses in Woven City will have in-home robotics to help with the more mundane tasks of daily life. The homes will have full-connectivity, which will be needed for the sensor-based AI to automate many household chores, like restocking the refrigerator and taking out the trash. Power storage units and water purification systems will be hidden beneath the ground.

Intelligence At The Edge

Blaize is a computing company that optimizes AI at scale wherever data is collected and processed from the edge. The company enables a range of existing and new AI use cases in the automotive, smart vision, and enterprise computing segments. The company claims that developers can create new classes of products to bring the benefits of AI and machine learning to broad markets.

The company has developed a fully programmable GSP architecture that utilizes task-level parallelism and streaming execution processing to take advantage of very low energy consumption, high performance and scalability. Blaize claims that, in comparison, existing GPUs and FPGAs exert a much higher energy price, while CPUs cost more and scale poorly, and all are subject to excessive latency due to their sequential execution processing architectures.

Full-Body Haptics Suit

Haptics are all about the sense of touch. Now you can immerse your entire body – or at least 70 tactile points mainly around your torso – into the world of artificial experiences. The BHaptics Tacksuit provides an audio-to-haptic feature that converts sound into haptic feedbacks that are felt real time around your torso. For example, when a bomb explodes or you hear footsteps during a PC/VR game, you’ll feel the experience from the right direction. You’ll even be able to feel Samurai cuts and friendly hugs.

Security Comes In Many Forms

There are many ways to protect your PC data and applications, from hardware encrypted portable storage devices, backup solutions, file repair software, and data recovery, to digital forensics services. SecureData provides both products and services in these areas. At CES, the company demonstrated a secure UBS drive which they claimed was the only hardware encrypted flash drive in the world with keypad and Bluetooth authentication.

Wireless Six-Degrees Of Freedom (6DOF)

Atraxa’s system tracks 6DOF motion without the need for optical cameras or infrared markers to be placed around the room, or mounted externally to the XR headset or controller. And no line of sight—or wires—are required between the headset and controllers. Unhindered by wires or line-of-sight constraints, users can move freely in large spaces. Even move from room to room without any room mapping, or controller orienting (or reorienting) is required. Tracking starts immediately and lasts without interruption.

The tech combines electromagnetic (EM) and inertial technologies into a single sensor-fusion tracking platform. The IMU (inertial measurement unit) returns acceleration and angular velocity data. The EM tracker delivers true position and orientation data; it also establishes the tracking volume and local coordinate system. Atraxa is comprised of two main components: a tracker module and receiver module. The tracker module houses the IMU and an EM transmitter coil that generates the magnetic field (i.e. the tracking volume). The tracker modules are embedded into the handheld controllers (or other peripherals).

Real-Time Accident Report

Sooner or later, all of us get into an automotive accident. When that occures, wouldn’t it be great to have a record of what happened? Through the use of embedded acceleration sensors, MDGo generates a real-time report in the case of a car crash, detailing each occupant’s injuries by body region. The company’s technology enables accurate delivery of needed services and support by providing optimal medical care in the case of an emergency and supporting the claim process.

Smart Factory

Could a factory think for itself or autonomously design a better car or aircraft? Can it eliminate waste? All of these questions fit into the realm of manufacturing intelligence. One company with experience in this area is Hexagon, claiming that their technologies are used to produce 85% of smartphones, 75% of cars and 90% of aircraft.

Their Smart Factory approach aims to have fewer inputs, zero waste and high quality. All this is achieved through sensor, software and autonomous solutions that incorporates data feedback to improve work to boost efficiency, productivity, and quality across industrial and manufacturing.

A Cool “Uncooled” Methane Gas Detector

The FLIR GF77 Gas Find IR is the company’s first uncooled thermal camera designed for detecting methane. This handheld camera offers inspection professionals the features they need to find potentially dangerous, invisible methane leaks at natural gas power plants, renewable energy production facilities, industrial plants, and other locations along a natural gas supply chain. The gas detector provides methane gas detection capability at roughly half the price of cooled gas inspection thermal cameras, to empower the oil and gas industry to reduce emissions and ensure a safer work environment.

IoT Arduino Adds LoRaWAN Connectivity

You can now connect your sensors and actuators over long distances via the LoRa wireless protocol or throughout LoRaWAN networks. The Arduino MKR WAN 1310 board provides a practical and cost effective solution to add LoRa connectivity to projects  requiring low power. This open source board can be connected to: the Arduino IoT Cloud, your own LoRa network using the Arduino LoRa PRO Gateway, existing LoRaWAN infrastructure like The Things Network, or even other boards using the direct connectivity mode.

Wearables, Ingestibles, Invisibles

One of the keys to a healthy life is nutrition. But what exactly constitutes ‘healthy’ food for a specific person? To answer that question, you need to measure and analyze the processes inside the complex human digestive system. Imec is working on prototype technology that is up to that task. It’s called ingestible sensors.

The company also develops wearables for medical and consumer applications that enable reliable, continuous, comfortable, and long-term health monitoring & management. This includes high-accuracy & low-power biomedical sensing technologies sometimes embedded into fabrics.