IoT news of the week for May 8, 2020

IFTTT can tell you when to change your home’s air filter: Last month on our IoT Podcast, we mentioned the new Ecobee service that sends you air filters for your HVAC system. Thanks to IFTTT, if you use 3M Filtrete Smart filters, you can set up an IFTTT recipe when it’s time to replace that filter, even if you don’t have a smart thermostat. You can’t set up an automatic order based on the sensor in the filter, but with IFTTT, you could change the color of a light, add a task on your to-do list, or create some other action that tells you it’s time to buy a clean filter replacement. The new IFTTT integration is one of several the company debuted this month. (IFTTT)

Covariant raises $40M to build better AI for robots: Covariant, a robotics startup that was initially born as an academic research project, raised $45 million in Series B funding this week. The additional capital will be used to expand the current team, which has approximately 50 members. Covariant is working to build a universal AI for robotics and currently has customers in the industrial sector, with one such customer using the technology for order-pick automation. Covariant CEO Peter Chen sees more opportunities for the company’s robotics in situations where manual labor is used extensively, such as “parcel mail, manufacturing, agriculture, and recycling.” (CrunchBase News)

Lost your laptop? Tile wants to help: Tile, the Bluetooth tracker company, announced a partnership with Intel this week to help track down lost laptops. You won’t, however, need a Tile tracker attached to your laptop. Instead, Intel is building Tile’s technology inside mobile computers so that when they’re in sleep mode, you can use the Tile network to find your lost laptop. Earlier this year, Tile partnered with HP for this feature on a specific computer model. With the new Intel partnership, Tile services can be offered on a wide range of laptops, depending on whether the original equipment maker wants to integrate it or not. (Liliputing)

India’s COVID-19 tracing app has a GPS flaw that could be used for location: As we in the U.S. wait for Apple and Google to move forward with their contact tracing APIs, other countries have already implemented apps to help with this. Some are centralized and do track the location of users, while others do not. Or at least they’re not supposed to. In India, where 90 million people have downloaded that country’s official track-and-trace app, GPS location isn’t meant to be available. But it is, or at least it can be based on a security report that suggests users can spoof their GPS location to falsely tell nearby app users they’re infected. Even worse, hackers could use an app exploit to triangulate users’ locations. This is why we can’t have nice things, like, you know, privacy. (Wired) — Kevin C. Tofel

Apple Watch ECG may detect heart conditions not caught by hospital testing: After reading the brief on this study from the European Heart Journal, I may upgrade my old Apple Watch 3 to a newer model with the built-in ECG. An 80-year-old female patient with a history of heart disease went to the hospital with chest pains. Using a traditional 12-lead ECG, the hospital didn’t see anything amiss, or out least out of the ordinary, for this particular patient. She then showed recent ECG history graphs from her Apple Watch, which exhibited evidence of myocardial ischemia, a condition where not enough oxygen reaches the heart. Based on the hospital’s ECG, she might not have had the coronary artery stenting procedure that data from the Apple Watch said she needed.(European Heart Journal)

2M connected vehicles in use to track post-COVID-19 economic recovery: As we all wait for the pandemic to settle down so we can go out and spend our money again, there’s quite a bit of interest In what happens next. Specifically, how quickly will the economy come back after an expected decline in the second quarter of this year? Geotab wants to help provide early indicators for metrics around that. Around 2 million connected commercial vehicles use Geotab’s service so the company is putting all those datapoints to good use. This week, it launched a dashboard to track commercial transportation trips, fuel fill-ups, and trade shipments between the U.S. and Canada. The idea is to watch these data points as a leading indicator for upticks in trade that require the shipping of supply-chain goods. (ZDNet)

The next wireless charging chip is…NFC? This news came out of left field for near-field communications chips, but NFC will support wireless device charging. This week, the NFC Forum approved a specification to make this happen. Don’t get too excited just yet, though. For starters, it will take time for device makers to implement wireless charging with the chips that we typically use for mobile payments and authentication. And you won’t be charging a phone or other large battery-powered device over NFC, either. The NFC Forum is targeting smaller devices such as battery-powered IoT sensors or wearables. That’s because of the power limitation; you’ll only be getting a 1-watt wireless transfer rate from NFC. (NFC Forum)

While COVID-19 is hurting most businesses, it’s helping useful IoT thrive: As Stacey noted earlier in the newsletter, the current pandemic is causing much of commerce, and many services, to hit a standstill. But some of IoT is a bright spot. This week, I noted several IoT products that are thriving due to the current challenges of shelter-in-place orders, from connected medical devices that are seeing surging demand and Raspberry Pi devices that can power ventilators and other needed products experiencing near-record breaking sales. Even the smart home could see a boost as we all bolt the locks on our doors seeking safety from the virus. (StaceyOnIoT)