SAP and NTT say they are expanding their established partnership to develop IoT systems for the transport industry. Their initial project will combine vehicle-monitoring systems from SAP with driver monitoring technology from NTT.
The two companies have developed a solution that combines SAP's Connected Transportation Safety (CTS) system, which collects and analyzes vehicle related data, with NTT's hitoe sensing fabric '” jointly developed with Toray Industries '” and an NTT IoT analytics platform. This provides driver's biological data including heart rate and mental fatigue estimate.
The project aims to provide more accurate and real-time information about vehicle and driver. SAP and NTT will conduct a field trial from October 2016 in conjunction with Keifuku Bus Co in Fukui, Japan. They say they aim to have the service operational from January 2017 and to subsequently roll it out in the United States and Europe.
hitoe, according to NTT 'is a functional material capable of measuring biomedical signals to obtain, for example, a person's electrocardiogram or electromyogram.' It was developed by applying NTT-developed conductive fiber technology, in which fiber material is coated with a conductive polymer, to a nanofiber material developed by Toray Industries. Use of nanofiber, NTT says, 'improves adhesion to the skin, thereby facilitating stable measurement of biomedical signals.'
Also, NTT says: 'high conductivity and durability have been obtained in hitoe material by filling the gap between nanofibers with conductive polymer using Toray's advanced high-order processing technology.'
This co-innovation effort started in Palo Alto, California and has been led by NTT Labs and SAP Labs China. SAP and NTT Group say they intend to continue co-innovations in various areas with new technologies and expand the partnership globally. Their initial focus will be cloud based IoT services and Industry 4.0.
The two companies say they are also accelerating their collaboration around private managed cloud solutions such as SAP HANA enterprise cloud leveraging NTT's global data center network around the globe.
