embedded world North America 2025

Presenter: Damon Barnes | Bluetooth SIG

Bluetooth® technology remains the world’s most widely deployed wireless standard, with more than 5 billion devices shipping annually. By 2029, that number is expected to reach 7.7 billion, according to ABI Research, driven by continued growth across audio, data transfer, localization, and device network use cases. To maintain its momentum and address evolving demands of Bluetooth devices, Bluetooth® technology is advancing with the introduction of Bluetooth® High Data Throughput (HDT). This upcoming enhancement to Bluetooth LE will significantly increase data rates while improving energy efficiency and connection reliability. In this session, Damon Barnes, director of technical marketing, will provide an early look at HDT, explore its technical benefits, and highlight how it will enable a new generation of high-performance Bluetooth LE solutions.

Presenter: Vivek Mathur | LTIMindtree Limited

Since its introduction in 1999, Bluetooth has become a foundational connectivity protocol for countless personal, consumer, and industrial applications. Bluetooth has evolved to include enhanced functionality, allowing users to create adaptable solutions for diverse deployment environments. With this growth, the security landscape for Bluetooth has also shifted – bringing both significant progress and fresh challenges. The IT and IoT security communities continue to raise concerns about Bluetooth’s widespread use in personal devices, prompting manufacturers and users to adopt stronger, up-to-date security practices. The Bluetooth SIG, its working groups, and industry contributors have worked diligently to implement security enhancements and stricter compliance, but the need for ongoing improvement remains. Advances like Channel Sounding open new opportunities for access control, hyper-localization, and personal space interactions, yet introduce unique security and privacy risks. Without proven technical solutions and clear communication, adoption of these features may lag, limiting Bluetooth’s potential. This session offers a comprehensive overview of Bluetooth’s security evolution, detailing coordinated responses from the Bluetooth SIG and community, and concludes with LTIMindtree’s insights and recommendations from its 25-year Bluetooth legacy.

Presenter: Alfredo Perez | Bluetooth SIG

Bluetooth® technology has been the cornerstone of wireless human interface device (HID) solutions for nearly two decades, enabling the widespread adoption and commercial success of plug-and-play wireless keyboards, mice, gaming controllers, and more. To address the needs of evolving or more sophisticated, latency-sensitive HID applications, Bluetooth is introducing two new features that enhance its HID capabilities and allow supporting HID report rates of 1k or better. The first feature, HID ISO, leverages the transport and synchronization advantages offered by Bluetooth LE isochronous channels to enable faster HID report rates via a Connected Isochronous Stream. The second feature, HID SCI, exploits a new Bluetooth LE core specification (not based on isochronous channels) that permits the configuration and fast modification of ACL connection parameters to adaptively adjust HID report rates in an application. This session will provide an overview of HID ISO along with an early introduction to HID SCI, highlighting and comparing their technical merits, as well as the benefits they offer for next-generation Bluetooth LE HID solutions.

Presenter: Donatien Garnier | Blecon Ltd

Bluetooth beacons are everywhere, from warehouses to hospitals, delivering low-power and cost-efficient identification and location tracking at scale. However, the first-generation of beacon technologies has notable limitations: provisioning is often manual and hard to scale, contextual status data can’t easily be transmitted and privacy and authentication models are weak or non-existent. Meanwhile, expectations have evolved. Consumer products like Apple AirTag and Tile have raised the bar with privacy-respecting tracking at massive scale. New enabling technologies such as thin-film printed batteries, ambient energy harvesting and ultra-low-cost silicon are also redefining what’s technically and economically possible. In this session, Donatien Garnier, co-founder of Blecon, will explore the path to a new generation of beacon technology that meets these modern demands. We will examine scalable provisioning techniques, privacy-preserving identity schemes, secure encoding of status data without pairing and the broader implications of recent advances in Bluetooth technology and its ecosystem.

Presenter: Ashok Rajan | Embedded Club

In the current era, most of the devices we utilise on a daily basis are portable, connected and battery operated. This paper talks about the NearMe Ambient IoT (Self Charging) electronic locks which stands out from the existing typical or smarter (digital) locks. These Ambient IoT locks are not exceptionally robust, but they pave the way for a new revolution. These locks have inbuilt rechargeable battery (Ni-MH) with PMIC to harvest the energy from indoor/outdoor OPV cells. It minimises the effort required for manual charging and conserves the environment by reducing the use of disposable batteries. The lock has Bluetooth LE SoC interfaced to geared micro DC motor to control the lock. The newly introduced feature, “Channel Sounding,” in Bluetooth LE 6.0 offers enhanced security for accessing these locks by sensing distance between the lock and the key. These lock may include a display (E-paper) as an optional feature, and it is equipped with a button and LED for user accessibility. An IMU sensor is utilised to identify a lock position and to detect break events. This new lock, unlocks many potential use-cases in home, public places, travel, gym & remote areas. For instance, these locks serve as a replacement for the current locking mechanisms in trolley bags, drawers, wardrobes, hotel rooms, and padlocks. These locks are provided solely with digital keys, such as Ambient IoT smart cards, Remotes, or Mobile App. The keys will only unlock when they are near the lock (NearMe).

Presenter: Santosh Nagaraj | San Diego State University

In this talk, a new Frequency Based Ranging (FBR) technique will be discussed and compared with Phase Based Ranging (PBR) for Bluetooth Channel Sounding. FBR is based on the Sinusoidal Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (S-FMCW) ranging method. Propagation delays between Initiator and Reflector are converted to measurable frequency differences (analogous to phase differences in PBR). Similar to PBR, even FBR signals can be generated within existing Bluetooth packet structures. FBR offers two key advantages over PBR: (i) since frequency doesn’t need to be unwrapped, unlike phase, FBR allows ranging on a single channel; (ii) since measurements from multiple channels are not needed, much less time is needed for ranging. Consequently, FBR will allow ranging on just one Bluetooth channel and within a few milliseconds. This talk will focus on a quantitative comparison between FBR and PBR in the context of Bluetooth applications. Performance and accuracy will be compared for different distances and propagation environments. It will be shown that while PBR is better at shorter distances with line of sight propagation, FBR has the edge at longer distances and in multipath environments. From the hardware perspective, FBR is also compatible with devices that are designed to implement Bluetooth PBR. Complementary capabilities of FBR and PBR, coupled with their hardware compatibility, suggest that they can be integrated to create a new robust channel sounding technology for Bluetooth.