It may seem like the IoT happened overnight. The truth is it has taken a full decade for pricing trends to become attractive enough for its broad implementation. This in turn allows all devices to cost effectively be connected. So let me set the stage.
The Cost of Sensors Has Dropped over 60%
They are now being deployed everywhere, in our houses, cars, and factories, intelligent devices that capture data about how we live and what we do. Once they are networked they can be programmed to talk to one another. Soon well be able to choreograph them to respond to our needs, solve our problems, even save our lives.
Bandwidth and Processing Power Continue to Increase, While the Costs Have Tumbled by over 75%
Wi-Fi coverage is now ubiquitous, wireless connectivity is available for free, or a very low cost. Already, scores of products have emerged to take advantage of Bluetooth Smart, one low-energy radio protocol that hit the market in October 2011. Another rising technology is NFC, short for near-field communication; Visa just announced that it plans to let Samsung smartphone users make payments to merchants wirelessly over NFC instead of swiping a card, and some billboards are using the protocol to beam content to passersby who ask for it.
But it is the Smart phone that Has Had the Biggest Impact
They have become our personal gateway to the IoT, thereby giving us a natural way to communicate with all the new smart objects. Of the nearly 900 million new smartphones shipped last year, most can communicate with nearby sensors via multiple wireless languages. Getting back to the cause and effect, the staggering scale of the smartphone market has spurred sensor manufacturers to miniaturize and innovate, driving the cost of all the wireless chipsets (both sensors and receivers) down to a pittance.
Location management, from GPS to Presence Management
With GPS we can reliably know our location within 75 feet, give or take, and that knowledge has transformed our lives immeasurably: step by step driving directions, local restaurant recommendations, nearest Starbucks, and so on. But with presence technology, we have the potential to know our location absolutely, down to a foot or even a few inches. That means knowing not merely which bar your friend is at but which couch shes sitting on if you walk through the door. It means receiving a coupon for a grocery item on the end cap at the moment you walk by. This simple linkbetween a tag on us and a tag in the worldstands to become the culmination of the location revolution, delivering on all the promises it hasnt quite fulfilled yet.
Picking an industry sector that will maybe benefit the most:
The Medical Internet of things and the Future of Health Care
Dr. Anthony Jones, who works for Philips Healthcare, a company that designs machines and software for hospitals around the world, says a nurse could check on you four times a day, or there could be networked machines that send data on your vitals in a constant stream to a master control.
“If I now have a continuous monitor, and I have that data going up into a central repository, I can write algorithms and put some intelligence into that repository that allows me to look for trends,” says Jones. “So part of what the Internet of things will allow is much more sophisticated, much more continuous monitoring.”
Done right, this new era of monitoring could also help keep you from going into the hospital in the first place. Advances in wireless and medical tech will go even further still, according to Ed Price at Georgia Tech’s Institute for People and Technology.
“If you’ve got chronic blood pressure issues, maybe there is blood pressure sensor in your seatbelt in your car,” says Price. “Obviously there is no time for a human to analyze all that data, but an algorithm in a computer can look at all your data for your blood pressure and trigger when there is an event that needs to be noticed by care providers.”
And the health care reform law plays a role here, as doctors and health care companies get new incentives to make people well and keep them that way.
“Electronic devices [and] tele-medicine will be a key part of that,” says Price.
I am not minimizing the remaining challenges;
With security being the most daunting to solve. A bigger concern, perhaps, is simple privacy. Just because weve finally warmed up to over sharing in the virtual world doesnt mean well be comfortable doing the same in the physical world, as all our interactions are captured, about where we are and what were doing.
Communication standardization, to ensure all of these different devices can essentially self-discover themselves. The Industrial Internet Consortium should go a long way towards addressing this issue.
Power, while sensor batteries can last up to two years they will still need to be changed. I suspect the ultimate solution will be some type of wireless power. All of these issues will be solved in the next few years so it is time to start imagining the possibilities.
