The food and beverage industry globally has experienced a significant growth over the past few years. This is majorly attributed to the industry's strong developments and innovations, which have further enhanced and strengthened consumption and spending. There has been a marked movement in consumer preferences and demands, which is further indicated by a drive towards premiumization and customization. Manufacturers of a number of food and beverage products are now looking at creating differentiated products, whereby consumer preferences are being accounted for, to create new market opportunities.
Furthermore, there is a clear shift in food consumption patterns from unprocessed foods to processed and ultra-processed foods. Hectic lifestyles in developed nations have led to a declining trend of cooking and a growing trend of snacking. Consumers are nowadays more inclined to buying processed foods such as bread & cereals, frozen & packaged meals, and processed meat & fish. This has resulted in the growing demand for various types of convenience foods, which, in turn, is expected to drive the consumption volumes of food processing ingredients in the food & beverage industry.
Similarly, there are various other factors also affecting the consumer choice of food & beverage products, including their preference for clean label products. Clean label products are products that are free from GMOs, synthetic ingredients, and allergens and are natural and organic. The trend of clean label is gaining global significance, especially in North America and Europe, with markets in emerging regions such as Asia Pacific, South America, and the Rest of the World, experiencing a steady rise in demand. Consumers are increasingly becoming more aware of the ill-effects of the usage of artificial ingredients. The rising consumer demand for clean label products and the industrial response to these demands can be well depicted from the growing market for these products, further affected by a number of product launches of the product type, in various sub-categories of food in 2015.
The communication & connectivity technologies are being tested and developed to meet the demand for next-generation. Wired network technologies, such as KNX and LonWorks, and wireless networking technologies, such as Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi HaLow, PROFIBUS, Bluetooth, Smart, Bluetooth 5, ZigBee, Cellular (3G, 4G and 5G), Z-Wave, NFC, RFID tags, EnOcean, Thread, DECT-ULE, ANT+, ISA 100, GPS, and 6LoPAN, are witnessing growth in application-specific areas. Adoption of any particular connectivity technology is driven by features such as low power consumption, high throughput, and coverage among others.
The newer technologies such as Internet of Things, cloud computing, fog computing, artificial intelligence, neural networks, robotics, automation, M2M communication, and V2X communication are giving rise to a set of new applications for autonomous vehicles, wearable devices, smart healthcare, smart city, and smart energy among others. To enable all these applications, communication & connectivity technologies are evolving at a greater pace than ever before.
Healthcare analytics is the efficient use of data and related business insights developed through statistical, quantitative, predictive, comparative, cognitive and other emerging applied analytical models. Healthcare analytical tools help reveal and understand historical data patterns, predict future outcomes and provide actionable insights to drive fact-based decision making for improved clinical, financial, and operational performance of healthcare organizations. The use of analytics helps healthcare systems reduce healthcare costs and improve the quality of care transparency and regulatory compliance.
The healthcare analytics market is witnessing tremendous growth across the globe due to the factors such as federal healthcare mandates to curb rising healthcare costs, initiatives to boost the adoption of EHRs, availability of big data in healthcare, technological advancements, and the increase in venture capital investments. Key players in the market are focusing new product launches, partnerships and collaborations, acquisitions, and expansion to expand their presence in the market.
As the enterprises across industries are growing, there is a paradigm shift in terms of technology used by them. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one such buzzing term in the computing industry and is all set to revolutionize various industry sectors. AI is defined as the system that combines computer science and neuroscience to compute and analyse data so that it can act in a way similar to the human brain. Cognitive capabilities could be learnt with the help of an expert (supervised) or on its own (unsupervised). It includes various types of hardware, machine learning software, AI platforms, and services involved in cognitive computing of data in the form of image, video, speech, text, computer logs, big data, and sensor data. An increasing demand for the AI technology is fuelled by affective computing, cognitive computing, virtual reality, perceptual interface, affective agents, augmented reality, facial recognition, emotion detection and recognition, and chat bots service. Due to its vast application areas, the AI technology has occupied the main stream discussion among industry experts and researchers. As a result, several enterprises have increased their R&D investments in studying AI application areas.
The major challenge for any business today is the gap between data collection, insights, and action; and the AI technology helps businesses to bridge this gap in real time. Data generated across the organization by natural human language, machines, and business processes is increasing rapidly. At the same time, the volume of structured and unstructured data is also growing at an exponential rate. Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) are the integral parts of the AI technology to help businesses to gain valuable insights hidden in unstructured data, analyze the information, and then find the relevant answers to make more confident and effective business decisions that impact their performance and revenue. With the advancement in AI technology hardware manufacturers are able to replace lager hardware devices with smaller, efficient, and powerful