Just what is the Internet of Things? There are lots of people who have heard of it and some know what it means, but very few know what it could mean for their lives. There are a range of applications and use cases, but before we go into some of them, lets look at a few statistics first:
- Going back 26 years to 1990, there were just 300,000 desktop computers connected to the Internet;
- Fast forward to today, there are around 2 billion mobile phones connected to the Internet;
- It’s predicted that by 2020, there will be 21 billion vehicles, wearables, fridges, freezers, kettles and more, connected to the Internet.
Those are some pretty impressive numbers, but what does it mean for our day-to-day lives? Let’s look at a few areas.
Your Home
We’ll start with one of the most obvious, and probably biggest areas, our own homes. There are lots and lots of ways that the Internet of Things will change our homes, here are a few examples:
- Lights – controlled by your app or automatically based on data from your behaviour or the time of year;
- Fridges – orders more food when it detects that you’re running low on something;
- Coffee machines – controlled via your phone so that you can have a coffee ready by the time you get home;
- Thermostats – again, controlled by an app but learning your behaviour, comfort levels and optimising the temperature in your home.
Transport
There are a multitude of ways that the Internet of Things may affect our transport options in the future. We could see the autonomous vehicles that could be integrated into a system of traffic lights, parking and roadsigns.
The exciting thing here is that a lot of the technology already exists, such as:
- Parking apps – there has been a lot of growth around these kind of apps which will know where there is a free parking space in a parking garage and guide you to it. It’s not hard to imagine this technology being built into a car.
- Self-driving – Tesla have become famous for much of their work in this area and it’s not hard to see why. Leading on from the previous point, parking apps combined with self-driving could lead to a car finding a car parking space and parking itself.
There are many more possibilities here which have been written about before.
Medical and Healthcare
This is where some of the most exciting advances may come from and could literally change people’s lives. We’ve seen Samsung and Google push forward technology here and they’re not going to slow down.
We also have relatively simpler inventions too such as:
- Smart pills – pills that not only help make you better, but also take readings from your body to assess the effectiveness of the treatments and even send that information to your Doctor.
- Smart bottles for pills – leading on from this and somewhat similar to the smart fridge idea, a pill bottle that senses when you’re running short on medication and telling your Doctor or Pharmacist.
The possibilities really are endless and to help tell you a bit more, the team at RS Components put together this infographic on the Internet of Things to help visualise it’s growth.
