Sandy, UT: Opengear has announced that Interactive Motion Technologies has successfully deployed Opengear’s remote management gateways to each of its internationally-located InMotion neurorehabilitation robots. Using Opengear’s solution, Interactive Motion has been able to perform remote maintenance of robots in hospitals all over the world from the company’s headquarters in Boston.
The results of using Opengear’s cellular-connected remote management have been transformative: service calls can now be completed from the Boston office, and minor robot updates no longer require a tech to travel and be on-site, rendering what had been huge cost and time expenditures associated with travel for minor updates unnecessary. Interactive Motion is currently investigating additional opportunities to integrate Opengear’s solution as a part of their product.
Interactive Motion selected the Opengear ACM5004-G-E for maintaining the systems of InMotion robots worldwide via secure cellular out-of-band connections. InMotion robots have been at use in hospitals around the world for over a decade, with some models still running on legacy versions of Ubuntu or Red Hat Linux. These systems are not on the Internet or even local Ethernets, are out of date with security patches, and cannot be connected to hospital networks. Because the connection Opengear uses is not Internet-based but done via cellular out-of-band – and because Opengear’s gateway provides secure tunneling – the security of the older systems in use is protected. Additionally, the value added by a low cost gateway and $20/month cell service means Opengear’s solution easily pays for itself by saving technician time and travel costs.
“It’s exciting to see Opengear technology deployed in a way that not only saves a business time and money, but also gets to play a role in helping rehabilitate stroke patients via the extraordinary InMotion robot,” said Todd Rychecky, VP Sales Americas, Opengear. “On the business side, the trouble and costs of traveling internationally for trivial maintenance issues are exactly the kind of burden our cellular out-of-band gateways with secure tunneling are designed to solve. All Interactive Motion had to do was ship the gateways with instructions to plug them in. Now, the ACM5004-G-E makes it so their technicians can access the robots from home, and they’re doing nine out of every ten service calls with no travel required.”
InMotion robot-assisted therapy helps moderate to severe stroke patients reacquire and improve motor skills in impaired upper limbs. Leveraging the brain’s incredible neuroplasticity, an InMotion robot will guide a patient’s arm through a range of motions, assisting the movements as needed. These motions cause the brain to rewire its neurons, and relearn how to control the body. The robot takes the patient’s own movements as feedback, tapering off its assistance as the patient’s brain learns and regains motor control. In this way, InMotion robots take patients from an utterly passive role to an active role, so that by the end of therapy the robot is adding zero assistance.
In the practice of ensuring that these robots stayed fully functional, maintenance issues would arise. Hard drives would fail, or researchers would ask for new customized features. To maintain these systems, technicians would travel out to the sites. In some cases, this meant a $5,000+ expense and overseas travel to delete a single character in a code string: a simple three-minute job if they had remote access. Now with Opengear, they do.
“We call the Opengear product ‘a @#$*ing miracle!’” said Dr. Daniel M. Drucker, Scientist at Interactive Motion. “It feels like magic. The idea that I have this robot I’ve helped to make, and I expected I’d never be able to connect to again unless I traveled to where it is and typed on the console; suddenly I’m able to take this box, ship it and have them plug it in. And now I’m here in Boston, type a couple commands, and a minute later I’m connected and able to issue commands on this robot. And it’s going over the global cell network.”
For Interactive Motion and the hospitals and patients using their robots, Opengear’s remote management solution improves operational efficiency and reduces mean time to repair. Rapid robot repairs mean patients are not left waiting. Researchers asking for special experiments and features can have those delivered quickly and remotely. Technical staff can better invest their time where it’s most valuable: developing technology to serve patients.
Also, ExtraHop Introduces Open Data Stream Technology Enabling Enterprises to Set Their Big Data Free
SEATTLE, WA: ExtraHop Networks, the global leader in real-time wire data analytics for IT operational intelligence, today announced Open Data Stream for MongoDB and Open Data Stream for Elasticsearch. Building on existing Open Data Stream (ODS) solutions for Splunk and VMware Log Insight, ExtraHop’s first-to-market open architecture gives enterprise IT the flexibility and freedom to stream valuable data sets from ExtraHop into highly-scalable, and non-proprietary environments, which include the industry’s most popular database, as well as search and analytics engine. With these new capabilities, ExtraHop enables enterprises to set free their most valuable big data.
“The paradigm and promise of big data, coupled with the value it creates, demands free and unfettered access to vast volumes of data from a wide range of sources,“ said Eddie Satterly, CTO, Big Data and Analytics, Computer Sciences Corporation. “Such open access enables enterprises to freely explore, visualize, and query their data, and empowers IT to discover the type of valuable relationships and insights they require.”
Despite this important guiding principle of IT Big Data, IT Operations Analytics (ITOA) solutions have been rightfully criticized because they create restrictive silos of data that can only be accessed by a given vendor’s user interface or visualization tool. This practice limits data freedom, restricts customer choice, and inhibits the creation of valuable insight.
With today’s announcement, ExtraHop is expanding the means by which enterprises can achieve maximum IT and business value from their data. By combining ExtraHop wire data set with other valuable data in a highly scalable, non-proprietary database like MongoDB, or a powerful search, analytics, and data visualization suite like Elasticsearch ELK stack, customers can achieve:
· Richer and deeper insights by comparing and contrasting data from multiple sources
· Greater control over where critical ITOA data is stored and how it is queried, manipulated, and collected
· Increased flexibility of available business intelligence and analytics tools
“The most critical element and disruptive power of these (ITOA) technologies is their ability to facilitate exploration, experimentation, idea formation, and even dreaming, and the creative potential of what results,” wrote Colin Fletcher and Jonah Kowall in the June 2014 report Apply IT Operations Analytics to Broader Datasets for Greater Business Insight. “Analytics software will continue to evolve along these lines, in particular, making it easier for broader and broader audiences to linguistically and visually explore larger and larger datasets and possible correlations within.” Additionally, in a February 2014 webinar IT Operational Analytics: Big Data for the Data Center, Gartner estimated that by 2018, 25% of the Global 2000 will have deployed an ITOA platform taking data feeds from a variety of P&A systems – up from 2% in early 2014.
“ExtraHop’s wire data analytics has been a game-changer for MedSolutions. The ability to capture and visualize critical network transactions as they traverse our infrastructure has equipped us with the information we need to derive powerful insight about both our IT operations and our business,” said Tom Jansto, Enterprise Architect at MedSolutions. “ExtraHop’s new Open Data Stream capability; which we leverage along with MongoDB as our database and JSON Studios as our visualization tool, places even more valuable data at our disposal. We are now able to index and search for ad-hoc, multi-dimensional analytics and provide more granular views into application behaviors on a per transaction level. From an operations point of view, we are able to move further along our proactive model for service delivery, troubleshooting, and optimization. As for the analytics and informatics this now opens up for us, we are only now beginning to explore the depths of that wellspring.”
“The ELK stack – comprised of Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana – helps thousands of businesses
worldwide extract meaningful insights out of their data in real time,” said Steven Schuurman, Elasticsearch co-founder and CEO. “The wire data that ExtraHop’s Open Data Stream can send to the ELK stack will allow businesses to combine it with other machine and human-generated operational data, helping them gain a complete picture of their business so they can draw faster, more comprehensive insights.”
“As IT big data becomes increasingly mission-critical, ITOA and wire data analytics are proving to be powerful sources of insight for IT teams and line-of-business owners,” said Jesse Rothstein, CEO and co-founder of ExtraHop. “Unfortunately, the power of this data has often been curtailed by the siloed approach taken by many ITOA vendors that limits the ways in which businesses combine, visualize, and leverage these resources. At ExtraHop, we’re in the business of helping enterprises maximize the value of their IT data, and our Open Data Stream capabilities and open IT operations architecture give users the freedom to do so.”
And MOBOTIX announces icomply partnership
icomply V-TAS Pro PSIM integration platform fully supports MOBOTIX CCTV and access control technologies
UK: MOBOTIX AG, a leading manufacturer of digital high-resolution, network-based video security systems has released details of its partnership with icomply, the developer of V-TAS Pro, a Physical Security Information Management (PSIM) integration platform offering solutions for Critical National Infrastructure (CNI), Government, Retail and Transportation applications.
V-TAS Pro provides a centralised security platform which enables a wide range of security applications, such as Intruder Detection, Building Management and Fire Systems to connect concurrently on a common interface. Under the technology partnership, icomply have committed to fully integrating MOBOTIX technology into the V-TAS Pro software platform to enable seamless control of the entire MOBOTIX range.
“This is a valuable technology partnership for our channel partners and customers,” explains Dominic Chapman, UK Country Manager for MOBOTIX, “Through our partnership with icomply, we can build completely seamless security architectures that can benefit fully from the unique features offered by MOBOTIX technology in a multi-vendor environment through adherence with a common control platform.”
icomply provide a comprehensive range of software driven modules to create a seamless control room environment. Software modules such as Lone Worker, Guard Tour and Alarm Receiving work in addition to the everyday functions of a busy Control Room to provide a complete security package.
“We welcome the addition of MOBOTIX integration into V-TAS Pro and look forward to an ongoing technical and business relationship,” said Michael Gallagher, Business Development Director, icomply. “MOBOTIX is a highly regarded innovator and its products complement the open platform integration that we actively promote at icomply.”