EDF Energy and Chirp are partnering to experiment with data-over-audio technology in the Industrial Internet of Things. Using audio to transmit data could give a robust, flexible, easily installable connectivity that does not interfere with sensitive equipment. We will investigate this for applications such as health and safety wearables; remote updating of information tags; giving an operator information that they are working in the correct area; edge devices transmitting their readings through a series of rebroadcasters into an existing network. Data-over-audio can extend the existing network infrastructure by creating links between individual devices and a network, enabling the connection of the 90% of devices in the world that wouldn’t normally be part of an IoT ecosystem with the 10% of devices that would. Or it can deliver this capability to remote areas or areas that have had disruption of their services.

Chirp is a novel technology for sharing data as sound. Chirp uses short burst of audio that can be played from one device (a mobile phone, a YouTube movie, a TV or a radio) to be recognized by another device (currently a laptop or smartphone). Chirp uses human-audible sounds to send unique identifying codes (shortcodes): we describe them as electronic birdsong. See http://vimeo.com/45838932 for a simple introduction and http://chirp.io for demonstrations. Currently Chirp is realized as a smartphone app (iPhone and shortly Android) that allows colocated users to share data between phones. Uniquely, compared to competing technologies this can work offline (unlike Shazam), across different types of phone without cumbersome user setup (unlike Bluetooth) and is available on a very large proportion of existing smartphones (unlike NFC). Chirp was recently nominated for a Digital Design of the Year Award and is now on show at the London Design Museum. We will be featured in the May 30th edition of Radio 4’s The Bottom Line. In this project we will extend Chirp to what are called “second screen” scenarios. The term refers to the increasing use of mobile devices when also watching the TV, listening to the radio or using another device. Programme and content makers would like to be able to allow coordination of content between the devices. Example uses include quizzes, extra information about the programme, links to fan sites, etc. While attempts have been made to do this in other ways, Chirp has a very interesting potential in this space because it is explicit and users will be able to understand the intention to share.