Signalling that it's ready to compete with the likes of Apple and Microsoft for the Internet of Things and so-called smart home domain, Google has revealed that it's close to releasing an operating system specifically for the IoT and an accompanying communications protocol.
At its I/O conference Google unveiled its IoT OS, dubbed Brillo, saying that it intends to post a developer preview in the third quarter of this year, followed by the Weave communication system in the fourth quarter.
Brillo and Weave, taken together, form what a Google executive described as a stripped-down version of Android specifically for lightweight, low-power devices and the communications protocol enabling those devices to connect to and communicate with each other and any machines running Brillo.
Companies that make smart devices, in turn, can incorporate Brillo and Weave to equip their products for connecting to the Internet. Early reports have suggested that Google’s IoT OS is geared toward home devices, including cameras and connected locks, and reports say executives from Google's Nest smart home division are also involved in the project.
Apple, for its part, has touted HomeKit, an iOS framework akin to HealthKit and ResearchKit. And Microsoft has said that when it launches a next-generation OS, presumably this summer, among the versions will be Windows Mobile and Windows 10 IoT Core.
If many of the plethora of smart health devices — scales, sleep monitors, blood pressure cuffs, even some silverware, remote monitoring tools, smart clothes and wearables, just to name a few — support Apple, Google, Microsoft or all three, the ensuing technologies could open doors to extend healthcare providers’ reach into patients’ homes, collect new types of health information for keeping people out of the hospital, reducing readmissions and, ultimately, cutting costs.
But that remains to be seen. Today, these are just early versions of software, not to mention the smart devices themselves, all of which may or may not mature into products that look much like they do now.
