Roughly, 12,000 years ago, a revolution was underway in the way humans lived – The Agricultural Revolution. It slowly erupted across all the continents in the world. What has this got to do with the Internet of Things (IoT)? Well, hold onto your thoughts and let me explain!
The Agricultural Revolution was a great leap forward for humanity. The humans learned to domesticate the plants, animals and started permanent settlement in houses next to the agricultural lands. This is an intrepid tale of progress fueled by the human brain power. The evolution has gradually produced more intelligent people. Eventually, the humans became really intellectual. Now it is the time to make our surroundings intelligent and smart!
IoT is all about adding some intelligence to all of the physical objects that surround us today. The household appliances will be enriched, our vehicles will become more intelligent, streets or cities will be smart, agricultural equipment or methods of farming is going to be efficient, medical science will bring innovation and overall, there will be a reduced amount of carbon emissions emitted. This isn’t sci-fi but it is a reality of the modern world.
However, IoT isn’t a recent phenomenon but there are various ideas that are already clouting in the IoT arena, let’s discuss what future holds for them.
Wearable Gadgets:
There is a plethora of IoT wearable gadgets available to us in the market today. The gadgets like FitBit One or Jawbone UP can be worn during sleep that tracks motion. They record the quality of sleep and the number of times a person wearing the gadget wakes up during the night. The reasons for sleep interruptions can be used to overcome the difficulties.
As the fitness awareness has increased, the gadgets like Apple Watch, Microsoft Band, Nike Fuelband and Pebble Smart Watch are all becoming part of our everyday lives. These wearable keep track of the number of steps, walking or running distances and also stores how many calories are being burnt each day. They all can send the collected information that allows to keep track of individual’s daily progress and set targets to work towards their goals. Most of the smart phones have a built-in facility that comes with an app to achieve their resolutions.
There are some instances where people’s lives could be in jeopardy and a swift action could save their lives. The health related wearable gadgets could keep track of the blood pressure levels, stress levels and ECG ratings. Imagine, a smart phone can keep track these health related data and automatically takes an action when something is seriously wrong. This could easily prevent an adversity and save people’s lives.
These wearable are not only restricted to humans, the activities of our pets can also be monitored by attaching gadgets to them, which will record when they are at rest, walk, play or sleep.
In the future, we may see some wearable jackets that could self-adjust to the weather conditions automatically, smart mattresses that could enhance the quality of our sleep, smart gadgets that could recommend the types of food to balancing our diets and fitness trackers could be sending information to our doctors automatically. Researchers are already working on the next wearable that is your skin, ‘e-skin’, thus turning your skin into a touchscreen.
Household Gadgets:
The household gadgets like toasters, kettles, microwaves, cookers, refrigerators, televisions, lights, alarm clocks, thermostats, gas meters, washing machines etc. will all be embedded, enriched and enabled with wireless capabilities that can communicate with each other. These can be controlled remotely using our smart phones. All this can be done with single click of your mobile phone.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful to automatically switch on the cooker, so on returning from shopping, the rice is cooked and ready to eat? Miele cooking appliances range will allow you to do this. How about, if we could change the light settings to suit our mood using Philips Lighting? What if, my smart phone reminds me to stop by a superstore, because milk is running low in the refrigerator like Samsung’s fridge of the future? Maybe, an automatic message can be sent out to the recipients to reschedule the meeting, as the Kello smart alarm clock realises you are running late to work? Perhaps controlling a thermostat of your house remotely using smart phones with a NEST gadget? All of these scenarios are almost close to a reality these days.
In the future, we could see smart mirrors that lets you try out clothes digitally, the wardrobe automatically sends a message to start the laundry as it is running out of clean shirts and sensors installed in the house trigger the alarm or notify the security personnel during intrusion. The car manufacturers like BMW, Volkswagen, Google, Tesla, Toyota, Nissan and Hyundai are already making enormous progress to introduce software in its vehicles that will connect to users’ smart household gadgets. This will enable drivers to control gadgets from behind the wheel.
Intelligent Vehicles:
The intelligent vehicles are the most contemporary topic of our generation. Think of a scenario where we don’t have to worry about driving our cars any longer. It will free up time and can do a lot of productive things while the intelligent car takes care of our commute.
A lot of car manufacturers, like Google, Tesla, and BMW are already testing their self-driving vehicle ideas that soon becomes a reality. Other car manufacturers, like Toyota, Nissan and Hyundai are working on these intelligent cars that can interact with traffic lights, road signs, pedestrians and other cars, and ultimately keep passengers safe.
BMW has been seeking to partner with IT companies like Microsoft and Amazon for cloud services, to store and analyse data from connected and self-driving vehicles. The GPS technology is helping us in many ways and will play an integral part with self-driven vehicle innovation. The cloud technologies also play a pivotal role in all of this ensuring remote software updates are delivered to vehicles on the road. Recently, LG announced a partnership with Volkswagen to develop a connected car platform for in-vehicle entertainment systems and smart home controls.
By 2020, all new vehicles are expected to be connected to the internet.
Smart Streets or Cities:
The ambition to make our streets or cities also smarter is the next giant step when we are already thinking of everything that surround us to be smart and efficient.
What happens if the roads that we use every day, could become smart and start to collect a lot of information? A simple device fitted underneath the bridge can keep track of the wind information to alert the travellers of the adverse conditions, the device fitted on motorways can identify the least busy roads to divert the traffic or vehicles on the roads could generate enough energy to power the street lights.
Do you know that the entire city could be connected, monitored and analysed by computers, with a very little human intervention? Songdo, is the first such city in South Korea that can boast itself to be a smart city. I have only listed one scenario but there are so many ongoing or planned deployments of IoT that will enable efficient management of our cities. Some of these effective ways will lead to curbing the carbon emissions to protect our environment.
Agricultural Automation:
The Agricultural Revolution has paved a path for humans to prove themselves as intelligent amongst all other species. The automation of agriculture could be the next revolution towards its advancement.
Nowadays, GPS-guided agricultural equipment can plant, fertilize, and harvest our crops. Our scientists are already investing and implementing variety of ideas on how best they could collect information for harvesting crops better. The soil sensor information is key for the farmers. This combined with weather related information could potentially maximise the overall yield of our crops.
There was an article recently about one such area, which can get highly influenced by the IoT is water management. It talks about the revolution it is about to bring in the field of water management and distribution through a combination of optimisation techniques, IoT and predictive analytics.
Medical Innovations:
There are already some healthcare gadgets that are bringing benefits to our day to day routines. The innovations in medical industry combing IoT will benefit a wide range of people and can help in tackling biggest challenges that we face today in the world like Autism, Dementia or Cancer.
Internet of Medical Things (IMoT) is a collection of medical devices and applications that connect to health care IT systems via online computer networks. IMoT devices are can link into Cloud platforms on which stored data can be stored or analysed. The examples of IMoT include remote patient monitoring systems, hospital beds equipped with sensors to send vital patient related information etc.
Summary:
You can imagine the potential that IoT is about to bring to the stage in future, not only in its own field, but also in the cloud computing platform for remote access, predictive analytics for analysing huge amounts of IoT generated data and Big Data for storing the enormous amounts of data generated by various IoT enabled devices.
A lot of companies are working behind many of all these IoT devices. Some companies are trying to produce embedded operating systems and others low-power chips for many gadgets. Google’s Brillo, for instance, is a cut down version of Android for IoT devices. There are low-power processors built using ARM designs because of their electrical efficiency. ARM Holdings, with its computer chip technology powering so many IoT devices like smart home appliances, smart cars, smart phones/tablets, smart cities, wearable tech, and televisions, it’s no surprise that is has been recently sold for £24.3bn ($32bn) to Japan’s Softbank.
The future of IoT is fascinating and will change our lives forever. The possible integration of IoT into our lives is endless. This will bring a whole new sets of opportunities in many sectors in future. The revenue generated by the IoT – anything from connected cars and refrigerators to mobile devices and sensors – is expected to grow even more. It is predicted that 50 billion devices will be connected in 5 years’ time. By 2020, IoT revenue is projected to climb to $357 billion as more companies are looking to leverage the technology.
There are some concerns yet to be addressed by the rapid growth of IoT like the environmental impact of manufacturing or disposing of these devices. There are key security risks associated to IoT like privacy that are being addressed. But, we should not under estimate our desire for innovation that eventually will lead to evolution!