NextNav partners with Bosch to test barometric sensors for Z-axis vertical location

NextNav this week announced a partnership with sensor manufacturer Bosch Sensortec, which will subject its barometric-pressure sensors to the NextNav certification program that is designed to enhance the accuracy and performance of its Z-axis vertical-location offerings for a variety of use cases.

Dan Hight, NextNav’s vice president of business development and partnerships, said that Bosch is the second barometric-pressure sensor provider—after TDK—to agree to participate in the NextNav Certified program that was launched last year with TDK. Through testing with NextNav, sensor manufacturers can learn to optimize product to deliver the most accurate vertical readings with as little degradation, or drift, as possible as the sensor age.

“The fact that Bosch has wanted to improve their baro [barometric] sensors, so they have less drift and get certified within the NextNav service sends signals to the market that this is an important functionality, and increasingly, Z-axis is going to be an important capability—not just for public safety but for a lot of other areas of opportunity,” Hight said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications.

In the public-safety community, NextNav is best known for its Z-axis solution with FirstNet that is designed to provide the vertical location of first responders at an emergency scene in the largest U.S. markets. This is relatively straightforward using smartphones and other devices that are charged multiple times per day, but Hight said he believes Bosch is developing sensors that can be embedded in power-constrained IoT solutions like wearables that are not recharged as often

“We’re very excited about the latest baro sensors coming out from Bosch, because they do have low drift,” Hight said. “That just opens up the opportunity for more power-constrained opportunities—things like wearables will become a much larger part of this space.

“As you can imagine, whether it’s a wearable that you’re actually wearing on your wrist or something that you’re going to wear on your head, battery consumption and processing power are going to be constraints on those things, so having better sensors fundamentally will unlock new opportunities in those increasingly important apparatuses.”

Marcellino Gemelli, Bosch Sensortec’s head of global business development, echoed this sentiment.

“Our barometric pressure sensors produce highly accurate altitude measurements across a variety of use cases,” Gemelli said in a prepared statement. “We’ve continuously led the industry in elevating barometric sensor performance, and we are excited to be working with NextNav to further validate the capabilities of our technology.

“Our sensing solutions combined with NextNav’s software power enables smartphone, tablet, and wearable OEMs as well as wireless carriers to deliver precise altitude measurements to enhance consumer applications across a variety of use cases.”

Some of these use cases include providing automatic vertical location for drones, wireless access points and a variety of construction and building-maintenance assets, Hight said. Many of these applications were not part of the original NextNav vision, but such welcome discoveries often happen with technological innovations, he said.

“It’s a whole other use case that we weren’t thinking of, but that’s the whole point,” Hight said. “Just like when GPS was first put on phones, I don’t think people had a notion that I would hailing a car of a perfect stranger and get into it to take me somewhere. But yet, it did.”

And each use case calls for a specific set of performance characteristics from the barometric-pressure sensor, with some requiring little power, while others need to be lightweight or less expensive, Hight said. The NextNav Certified program conducts tests to help solution providers select the best sensor for the purpose, he said.

“You’re going to see that our baro-sensor program is going to modulate around different types of use cases.
Hight said. “We don’t want to say, ‘Use this sensor’—we don’t want to be in that business—but say, ‘You want to use a sensor that has these characteristics for these types of use cases.’ Because sensors matter, cost matters, weight matters—all of those types of things.”

On Oct. 28, NextNav closed its deal with Spartacus Acquisition Corporation, a special purpose acquisition company. NextNav became a public company on Oct. 29, trading under the ticker symbol “NN” on Nasdaq.