The Bluetooth Special Interest Group recently created a new standard that will challenge Zigbee and Z-Wave for health-care or "wellness" applications.  The new standard, called Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) will focus on low power consumption and quick connection initiation speeds, with a 3ms connection time.  While it's possible that the standard could eventually replace infrared in remote controls, the focus of the working group was towards the expected health care monitoring applications (heart monitors via wristbands etc) with consideration for light switches and other applications where the full Bluetooth stack would be overkill.  

BLE will use the same 2.4 GHz frequency spectrum as it's full fledged brother, but will be limited to a burst transfer speed of 1 MB/sec.  The competing technologies such as Z-Wave and Zigbee are equally slow in transmission speeds and have a slight upper hand on energy consumption.  While these other protocols use mesh topologies to connect to peers, BLE will employ a star topology which breaks free of the previous Bluetooth seven device restriction.  

While the aim of the working group was to keep the costs to a minimum such that BLE could be added with a negligible difference in end-user price, we have yet to see the actual numbers for costs or power consumption. 

The new standard brings the total Bluetooth variants to three, with Bluetooth High Speed, Bluetooth Low Energy and traditional Bluetooth among the repertoire for technophiles to memorize.    

Via: Register

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