5 WAYS THE Internet of Things (IoT) IS DICTATING THE FUTURE

By Lloyd Harris | 07/27/2020

To begin with, there are still technological barriers between humans and the super IoT world. Depending on the vendor, your HVAC system, might be talking in Bluetooth language while your Amazon Alexa device could be sending binary instructions to a wireless switch requesting a power-down operation to save the family unnecessary energy bills.

Despite some technological challenges, social and regulatory concerns, the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem comprising of intelligent machines is changing global dynamics and already altering areas such as healthcare, city planning, transportation, manufacturing, and power generation.

On a global scale, the number of IoT devices surpasses the entire human population. It is estimated that around 75.44 billion devices will be connected through IoT technology by 2025. This is a huge increase and contrastingly higher number of IoT devices when compared to the human population of around 7.6 billion people.

IoT devices might be micro, but they are definitely triggering micro-movements in how people live and work in the 21st century.

Eight ways the Internet of Things will change the way we live and work
2015 A. Scott | The Globe and Mail

Interestingly, the legend of an internet-connected ecosystem of things has now surpassed what many considered a mere tell-tale technology hype. We are witnessing the incredible impact of a technology-powered world. As a result of the booming technology of IoT, life today is quite different from 15 years earlier and will be materially different 10 years down the road.

While it is difficult to forecast the full impact of the Internet of Things (IoT), five enterprising industries are proving to be impactful areas worth benchmarking for how far the Internet of Things (IoT) is likely to doom or bless humanity.

5 IoT Industries And The Future

In a related article, I dedicated a considerable amount of time reviewing IoT, its features, and how it works. In order to fully grasp the impact of IoT and its contributions to the global economy, it is necessary to review 5 industries where the technology is currently being utilized to save lives, helping with mobility, optimizing manufacturing and food production tasks through automation.

The following illustrations are intended to provide some insights into how IoT enabled devices are influencing various sectors of our connected world. While this is an attempt to gauge the power of IoT driven technology, the appreciation, and usage of the Internet of Things’ (IoT) full potential is yet to be seen.

Smart Cities

According to an article from TechRepublic, smart cities technology is set to grow at an exponential rate in the next few years. This projected growth will be driven by advances in information and communications technology(including IoT sensors), and analytics platforms. This growth estimate according to the article is expected to reach a whopping $775 billion by 2021.

Globally, governments are looking into investing more in advanced IoT-enabled traffic management systems. Singapore for instance (named as the smart-city of 2018), uses a three dimensional (3D) geospatial data that gives the government a detailed view of every location so that city planners can study incidents of flooding, energy consumption, traffic congestion, and disease outbreaks.

A global technology powered by the Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to experience significant growth from emerging innovations such as wearable devices, vehicles to everything connectivity, smart trash collection, and smart city platforms that will focus on anything from population levels to traffic density and better management of smart cities.

Manufacturing

In the world of manufacturing, the Internet of Things (IoT) is shaping a generation of sensors networked systems that enable realtime interactions among machines, including the facilitation of plant production, supply chain management, and automatic monitoring of development cycles.

IoT is doing wonders in manufacturing. This is especially seen in industries like air conditioning production. In a typical AC manufacturing plant, both the manufacturing machine and the belt have sensors attached that continuously send data regarding the machine health and the production specifics to the manufacturer to identify issues beforehand.

A barcode is attached to each product before leaving the belt. The contents of the barcode include the product code, manufacture details, special instructions, and other relevant information. The manufacturer uses this data to identify where the product was distributed and also tracks the retailer’s inventory. Equipped with this information, the manufacturer can proactively restock retailers’ inventories that are running out of stock.

As a foolproof design, each retailer has a barcode reader to track the products coming from different manufacturers, manage inventory, check special instructions, and many more. All of these barcode readers are sensors-equipped and are connected to their counterparts using built-in IoT intelligence-supported systems.

Most compressors of modern air-conditioners have embedded sensors that emit data regarding their health and temperature.
The data are monitored continuously allowing manufacturers’ customer care teams to contact the customer for repair work or preventive maintenance in the event of a failure.

The above scenario with several events is just one of several areas, where IoT technology can be used to complement and automate manual work in manufacturing plants.

Healthcare

Healthcare is a very important sector where IoT enabled devices are redefining how doctors interact with patients and are making gainful contributions. By improving the delivery and management of infectious diseases, improving sleep quality, and effective epidemic monitoring through computer vision solutions at providers and home locations, IoT is altering healtcare in meaningful ways.

When you look at the Internet of Things(IoT) and the data that are being brought off of devices, we may have an unprecedented ability for some real medical breakthroughs in areas such as the causality of diseases. When used with optimized analytic solutions, the data obtained may provide insight into understanding patterns that professionals never had in the past.

Improved Disease Management.

In the past, communications and interactions with patients were limited to visits, telephone, and text devices. With the use of IoT enabled devices and the internet, activities such as remote monitoring are now possible and readily available at the click of a button or a simple hand gesture.

When patients are monitored on a continuous basis, real-time health data is available to ensure diseases are treated before they get out of hand. This new and empowering way of healthcare delivery empowers physicians to deliver superlative care and has increased patients engagement and satisfaction levels.

Emergency care is a vital and critical area of medicine that depends on outcomes that are influenced by time, availability, and accuracy of information. The advanced automation and analytic of the Internet of Things (IoT) technology facilitates more powerful emergency support services.

Talking medical devices remind patients to take their medications as prescribed and execute other necessary actions to improve health. Accurate collection of healthcare data minimizes errors and makes it easy for physicians to implement medication prescriptions with precision.

Self Driving Cars

Self-driving, as defined by SAE International is a sustained dynamic driving task (DDT) of a motor vehicle under specific conditions through a 5-stage process that ranges from “no automation”, to “full automation”.

From nearly-autonomous driving Teslas to wearable devices (i.e FitBit and other smart devices), used to keep track of real-time information on activities, the expanding IoT ecosystem is evoloving mobile offices, fleet managment, and vehicles automation in new ways.

We may be a long way off from achieving a total smart-auto-highway of IoT cars (including Ford’s plan to roll out fully autonomous cars in 2020), it is, however, fascinating to review some of the current impacts of the Internet of things (IoT) in the self-driving car industry through a few digital trends.

AIRBIQUITY. This is a data management services provided by a company based in Seattle, Washinton. The service impact on IoT driven vehicles for instance includes the platform’s ability to provide driving centric services powered by Data and Analytics. Some services AIRBIQUITY offers include trips report and trend analysis, driver monitor, limits and alerts, driver reports, and coaching.

Fleet Management: With the use of Bransys’ EZtoTrack platform, fleet managers can now access millions of trailers in realtime through the use of IoT powered cargo sensors. Vital analytics and reporting are provided in realtime for trailers temperature control, cargo sensor, asset tracking, safety camercas, and hydraulics.

Another company PRISMA PHOTONICS makes physical infrastructure, such as roads, power and water lines, smart using lasers and sensor, and by tapping into the global fiber-optic network. One of its unique Smart Roads solutions that stands out is the patented Hyper-Scan Fiber-Sensing technology that enables ultra-sensitive and intelligent-learning and other capabilities.

Driver’s performance monitoring: ZUBIE, a company based in Bloomington Minnesota has a real-time GPS tracker that provides monitoring capability for drivers’ performance. The impact on the IoT industry is its safety precautions attached to this technology. Vehicles equipped with such technology may perform better and increase fuel efficiency.

IoT Driven Agriculture

One of the world’s oldest occupation just got better with the use of Internet of Things (IoT) Technology. One company that is making an impact in the area of irrigation is PEAK 8 CONNECTED SOLUTIONS.DoodleBug, (a PEAK 8 CONNECTED SOLUTIONS), has a sensor that enables users to measure and monitor soil levels to gain insight about irrigation system efficiency and lawn/garden health.

Several IoT solutions such as crop and livestock monitoring, irrigation management, and precision farming enables smart agriculture and helps improve crop yields by increasing productivity and operational efficiency. IoT is expected to transform agriculture and help the world meet its estimated 70% food production by 2050.

The Future of IoT Technology

5G is critical to the success of the Internet of Things (IoT) because low latency connectivity is important for machines that drive themselves. According to research, IoT is expected to evolve from 75 billion to more than 100 billion between 2020 to 2030. This of course is predicated on the expected growth of mobile technology improvement from 4G to 5G.

The internet of things is essentially a forerunner to other advanced technology such as the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). The world is expected to experience AI-Driven machine learning algorithms that will minimize production waste, reduce unexpected downtime, and improve business operational efficiencies.

Other technological advancements like robotics and the emergence of Augmented Reality (AR) are expected to make inroads in activities such as assembly lines (where speed and precision are generally required), provisioning of expert support (using AR devices that provide telepresence), and quality assurance (AR that overlay image with additional information) to fast track production inspection with accuracy.

The Good and the Bad of IoT Technology

Truly the Internet of Things (IoT) is an incredible technology overall. Despite its many advantages and positive contributions, there are challenges and threats that continue to plague the technology. Some of these disadvantages include the following:

Lack of Integration and Compatibility .

With a babel of languages, IoT lacks the much needed protocols and standards to regulate interoperatbility and comptability. Manufactured devices may not work well in the absence of standarddization. This setback limits IoT full-scale expansion potential.

Considered as a Threat to Future Employment

Thanks to artificial intelligence (AI) technology and automation, workers are no longer competing solely with a human counterpart. From manufacturing to computer programming, workers are becoming more concerned and consider IoT and AI a threat to future employment due to the technologies’ improved algorithms and learning skills.

Reduced safety for users

There is a staggering amount of data that IoT devices can generate. Security and data privacy remains a major concern deterring consumers from fulling embracing IoT technology .

Within the medical industry, IoT healthcare monitoring solutions have the potential to be hacked and expose millions of patients’ personal identifiable information (PII). This vulnerability to hacking can change public perception of IoT due to the grave consequences.

Conclusion

The internet of things (IoT) can be a game-changer for any organization or business in general. As this technology continues to expand, certain revolutionary technologies are triggering investments and making big impacts on how we live and work.

Whether you are a business owner, a healthcare provider, or a farmer, the Internet of Things (IoT) is undoubtedly another positive type of technology that enormous opportunities to the world.

Next: UNCOVER THE TECH BEHIND IoT

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