Some Dallas companies at CES 2016:

• Texas Instruments announces partnership with DynoSense on a real-time health scanning system that uses 12 sensors to analyze 50-plus health metrics.
• Vinli announces Home Connect, a product to bridge smart homes and smart cars. Uber using Vinli and T-Mobile to equip its Vegas cars with Wifi.
• AT&T partnering with YoFiMeter for the Connected Glucose Meter, which transmits blood sugar levels, biometric data, and voice notes to health care providers.

Dallas Startup Week 2016 is April 12-16

• Imran Charania is the track leader for the IoT track. He is seeking volunteers to help organize the IoT sessions that will be offered during Startup Week.
• John Lindsay is the track leader for the legal track. You can contact him with potential legal topics of interest.

Max of Dallas Young Makers is seeking mentors for additional tracks, hopefully a robotics track.

We started the technical discussion on the formal announcement of 802.11ah aka “HaLow,” an 802.11 based protocol targeted towards IoT devices. Attendee Moses Asom discussed some of the protocol details and his experience with some the chipsets, which includes sub 1 GHz spectrum, limited mesh communication, target wake times, and contention & interference minimization.
(Editor’s Note: Video of Ed Hightower’s recently presentation at IoTSlam on Low Power Wide Area Networks is available.)

The keynote speaker was David Lary . Dr. Lary is a professor at UT Dallas. The discussion started with an overview of projects at the UTD MINTS, the Multi-scale Integrated Intelligent Interactive Sensing Consortium. We first focused on the project which explored the connection between environmental health and particulate matter, which included inputs data sets of sensor arrays, health outcomes, population density, and other disparate sets. Unexpected results included a regional correlation between mental health and temporal environmental activity. We then focused on a project which explored irrigation study, which included Google earth satellite image input. The image processing exploited the absorption regions of chlorophyll to detect the extent of “greener” vegetation areas in the image, which was correlated to water volume. Unexpected results include water waste in the form of leakage in irrigation systems.

Dr. Lary also provides independent consulting services in this space at http://www.datadrive.io/ and http://machinedatalearning.io/ .