Today, the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) honored five industry leaders for their outstanding contributions to the consumer technology industry. CTA presented the awards at the annual CTA Technology & Standards Awards Luncheon on the final day of CTA’s Technology & Standards Forum.
 
Matthew Diamond of Nokia Technologies and John Simmons of Microsoft received this year’s Technology Leadership Award, which honors industry volunteers who have demonstrated long-term industry leadership through active participation in CTA’s standards program.
 
Diamond, MD, PhD, Chief Medical Officer at Nokia Technologies, is the vice chair of CTA's Health and Fitness Technology Division Board and helped develop standards and recommended practices for consumer technology that advances health, fitness and wellness. Simmons, Media Platform Architect at Microsoft, led the creation of CTA’s Web Application Video Ecosystem (WAVE) Project, designed to make it easier for content creators to distribute video to consumer devices.
 
Poppy Crum, PhD, chief scientist at Dolby Laboratories; Mead Killion, PhD, president and CEO of Etymotic Research, Inc.; and world-renowned sleep expert Max Hirshkowitz, PhD, received this year’s Technology Achievement Awards. The awards recognize individuals only recently engaged in CTA standards activities whose contributions focused on new technologies or significant enhancements to existing technologies.
 
Crum and Killion helped lead the effort to develop the standard CTA-2051, which set performance requirements for devices to be distinguished as providing high-quality amplification enhancement and will support the Food Drug Administration's (FDA) efforts to open the market to over-the-counter hearing aids. Hirshkowitz led the development of standards ANSI/CTA/NSF-2052.1 and ANSI/CTA/NSF-2052.2, which defined characteristics and measurements, respectively, used in sleep tracking technology to provide consumers with more consistent, reliable data.
 
“We’re honored to recognize Matthew, John, Poppy, Mead and Max for their incredible contributions to the CTA standards program and helping to improve the consumer experience,” said Dave Wilson, vice president, technology & standards, CTA. “Their unique expertise and leadership brought the consumer tech industry together to help people hear better, sleep better and make the process of distributing and consuming professional video over the internet easier. The hard work of these individuals will help our industry continue to change lives for the better around the world.”
 
More than 170 industry professionals attended this week’s CTA Technology & Standards Forum. Highlights included:

• Publication of CTA/NSF-2052.2, a standard that delivers consistency and reliability to the user experience of sleep tracking technology and devices;

• Launch of a project to develop definitions and performance criteria for consumer technology that measures intensity of physical activity;

• Discussions to develop international standards that improve the consumer experience for audio, video and multimedia content and devices;

• Meetings of CTA’s standards committees developing standards for health, fitness and wellness technology, video technology and networking technology.

 
The next CTA Technology & Standards Forum takes place May 1-3, 2018, in Santa Clara, CA. CTA’s standards committees produce standards, guidelines and technical reports that help grow the consumer technology industry. All are welcome and encouraged to join any of these technology activities. For further information please visit standards.CTA.tech.