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IoT: harnessing the power of connected devices

The beauty of tools lies in what they give us back; time. Time to do other things, both more enjoyable and more productive.

The use of tools is widely seen in the animal kingdom. Apes have been seen using sticks to fish, catch ants and dig for roots. Humans have expanded further, making infinitely more complex tools to run our lives, but still requiring a human brain at some point in the process. Now, those tools are becoming smarter, and are beginning to communicate with each other, independent of human intervention. Cars, fridges, TVs, drones and just about any other appliance you can think of are all capable of interacting with each other. This is known as the Internet of Things (IoT).

The Footprint of IoT

While “IoT” is a relatively recent term, the concept has been around for a long time. Major cities around the globe have traffic control centers, where they can adjust timings on traffic lights and redirect motorists. Vending machines and ATMs have been able to notify their owners when running low for years.

IoT is essentially a new phrase for an old concept: developing better tools to make our lives easier and less mundane. The wheel replaced carrying everything. Horse drawn carriages replaced pulling the cart yourself. Motors replaced the need to care for a horse, and now we are beginning to see machines replace the need to be involved in driving or maintaining a car at all. Anyone with a modern luxury car will have noticed a central computer which knows when a service is due. All major car manufacturers have developed sensors that are planted throughout the car, collecting data about when the oil needs to be changed and when the timing belt is slipping.

In the near future, the car will be able to locate the nearest mechanic and book itself in for a service. With the right infrastructure, it can drive itself there after it has dropped you off at work.

Farmers around the world are now using sensors to measure temperature, rainfall and other variables that affect crop yield. This provides them with a greater ability to forecast their crop yield and to plan out their financial position.

Potential of IoT for Businesses

We continue our steady march toward liberation from boring tasks, increasingly allowing machines to do the work for us.

This presents two opportunities for businesses:

• How can work be automated to make employees more productive?
• How can products be connected to make customers’ lives easier?

IoT for the Benefit of Your Biggest Asset: Your Employees

Nothing breaks employee morale like having to continually complete dull and repetitive tasks. If you can free your staff from unnecessary administration, you free them to be more creative in their other work. Additionally, you can provide them with better data, so they can be more accurate with their work.

IoT also provides the opportunity to replace employees in the most tedious and dangerous tasks. Why send someone to deliver pizzas, or down a dangerous mine shaft, when you can send a drone? Why send a fireman into a fire if a drone could do the same thing? None of these tasks need to be done by a human.

Automation and its Benefits

Increasingly, companies are also looking at what aspects of their products are tedious for clients. What can the machine do for them so that they no longer need to worry about it? Can the printer automatically order ink when it is running low? Can the coffee maker decide how many cups of coffee you want to drink? Anything that is a simple task, but still has to be done, should be automated.

This change also presents opportunities for changing business models. Hardware manufacturers can now sell software and after-sales services with their products. Security companies have been doing this for decades, with their 24/7 monitoring of your security system and a subsequent response if the alarm is triggered. That business model relied on a phone line to provide the connection; now you can use Wi-Fi.

Companies can also use smart data to get the public to do your research and development for them; just look at what Oral-B has done.

Oral-B’s open-source toothbrush development represents another industry set to benefit from the IoT development; healthcare. Many tasks in healthcare are not only mundane and repetitive, but they can also be invasive and dangerous. Small implants can continually measure blood sugar, blood pressure, body temperature and any other number of indicators — without the interference from a nurse or doctor — while potentially delivering medication at optimal times and calling for help if something has reached dangerous levels.

There’s also the non-invasive side of health technology. IoT has enabled people to measure how active they are each day, competing with friends and colleagues and setting goals for themselves. Measuring your activity yourself each day would have been a painful and irritating task before pedometers with a Bluetooth connection. Now, Fitbit (the largest company in this field) is worth $1.84bn, after being founded only 9 years ago.

The Future is Here

The biggest changes we will see from IoT are still ahead of us. While cities are already interconnected to a certain extent, they aren’t automated. Traffic lights are still connected to a human to decide their timing, or connected to a simple program based on the time of day. Buses and trains are still driven by humans, rather than being automated on a fixed schedule. Cars have to inefficiently circle parking lots to find a spot, wasting precious time and fuel, and using up prime real estate just to store cars.

Imagine your car dropping you off at the office and then driving itself out of the city, to a giant, secure carpark, where it could sit and wait until you summoned it back. Or, even better, driving around under the control of a ride-sharing app, earning you a return on your asset!

If a street light stays on all night, but no one is there to see it, has it really stayed on? Yes. And it costs a lot of money to generate the power to keep it on. Every developed city around the world wastes piles of money on keeping lights on when there’s no one on the road. With some smart sensors, they could be turned off when not in use.

A Revolution in the Making

IoT is a revolution of hardware, and that is where a lot of the initial focus has been. Without the hardware — the all-important sensors and communication equipment — there’s no revolution. However, it is important to remember how much data is going to be generated by all of these smart devices. While tech giants and even medium-sized businesses are fighting over creating the physical hardware, startups are increasingly able to create market share from developing the software that will make these devices communicate with each other. It’s a great business if you build the platform that most of the market use, but getting that platform to communicate with others is also a great business.

Ultimately, people will buy smart devices and use IoT if it makes their lives easier, which is only possible with a true Internet of Things. If we end up with a bunch of different devices that don’t really communicate with each other, it’s not an internet. It’s just a lot of data being collected and not used.

Always remember that the goal is to make people’s lives easier. That’s all we have ever wanted from technology.

Author Bio: Prachi Gupta is a Content Writer and Tech Blogger at July Rapid, a San Francisco based mobile app design and development studio of July Systems Inc. July Rapid team assists Retail & E-commerce companies to conceptualize and build custom native iOSand Androidapplications.

The Article is Originally Published Here

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Shalie Desouza .