Aug 29, 2019

On June 26th OptConnect’s President and CEO Chris Baird was in Silicon Valley to receive the prestigious 2019 Best of Sensors Awards Innovative Product of the Year for OptConnect ema™. The award is an honor for our engineering team that created ema’s hardware and software and for our product planners who recognized the IoT market’s need for a solution like ema.
ema is the industry’s first Smart Embedded Modem™. In contrast with cellular modules that require product designers to spend large amounts of time, energy, and money obtaining cellular certification for their new products, ema is certified as an end user LTE Category 4 device by the cellular companies.
As a result, ema eliminates all of the cellular certification time and expense for product designers. Plus, with ema, designers can change their products as often as they like and never require certification.
Unlike other certified embedded modems that came before, ema includes built-in intelligence that constantly monitors its network connection, repairs the connection when necessary, reports on ema’s health, and even autonomously switches to alternative carriers to ensure that the product it’s designed into always has a reliable network connection — capabilities for which OptConnect has filed patents.
ema also provides native sensor support that allows product designers to connect sensors to dedicated pins in the ema modem. This enables designers to make their products simpler and less costly knowing that they can depend on ema to do most of the work.
Further, all of the data sent or received by the product is isolated from ema’s intelligent cellular connection monitoring and management data so that product designers can be certain that proprietary data transmissions are truly private.
It’s these features — an intelligently managed cellular connection, protection from certification costs, built-in sensor support, a robust firmware environment, and a dedicated path for product data — all provided in a form factor no larger than a postage stamp that garnered the Sensors Awards Most Innovative Product award.
And the best is yet to come. ema is not only a product, it’s an architecture. In fact, the ema product name refers to embedded managed modem architecture.
Based on reactions in the market, we expect to introduce additional embedded modems in the ema family that address more geographic markets and more transmission speeds so that more companies in more countries in more markets are able to take advantage of ema, the industry’s first Smart Embedded Modem™.
To learn more about OptConnect ema™, please visit http://www.optconnect.com/ema.