11 minute read
The Internet of Things
The Internet of Things: A new way of smart living?
Of all the emergent innovations, the Internet of Things (IoT) is arguably the most exciting and transformative of technologies. The concept of IoT is a highly connected network, harvesting data from sensors in an environment and linked to devices, where information is collected in the cloud and analysed to make smart decisions or solutions. It has the potential to save time, save effort and even save lives.
By Richard Forsyth
It is projected there will be 16.4 billion IoT connected devices by 2025.This is a rapid escalation of this sector when you consider IoT was not so long ago just an idea, a sci-fi-like concept to connect things, processes and people wirelessly and seamlessly through the internet, to make good decisions. By 2025 it is estimated that the Consumer Sector will generate over 40% of IoT Revenues. This demonstrates a goal by industry for IoT, where your home devices, your car, your house, your clothes all monitor your movement, where you are in your environment, decipher your needs and make everything you come near intuitively helpful before you even make your next move.
Today, the IoT has arrived – or more accurately, begun. You may not have noticed but it is seeping into the world around you. There are many examples of IoT applications today. Here, we look at some of those examples which mark the beginnings of an IoT networked world, which will evolve in a relatively short amount of time.
Home comforts
Anyone with a home-hub device such as an Amazon Echo has the possibility to connect it to the infrastructure of their home to automatically switch on lights via smart lightbulbs, or remotely warm the room when you sit down in a chair, or dim the lights to watch a film ‘without lifting a finger… or even raising your voice’, as the promotional blurb goes. But this is a just the start. Whilst we have the concept of a hub at home, the sheer range of devices that are now invented or can
be, makes your house more like an extension of your mind and body, or rather, your routines.
The home is a major target of IoT innovation. Already there is the i-kettle that can be remote boiled from a phone instruction, or more strangely, set to boil as you return home, or alight from your bed. More impressively, there is the smart fridge, which can monitor the contents inside itself to calculate expiry dates on food, recipe ingredients, shopping needs and shopping scheduling. Tired of going to the door in a pandemic or you wonder who is calling on you when you are out and about? There is the doorcam innovation which means you can remotely see who is at your door, and open the door even if you are miles away, from your smartphone. Sensors and switches can be put in almost anything these days and cameras can be button sized, so with connectivity, virtually any device can be triggered or scheduled to personal needs.
Wearable tech
Even more personal than your home tech is wearable tech, in the form of watches, head gear, eyewear, clothes, shoes and even digestible sensors.
Off the shelf health monitoring watches like ‘fit-bits’ are commercially successful. They track heartrate, sleep cycles, fitness levels, weight, hydration and diet, analysing your physical state potentially 24/7 all year round. With such a glut of data, a great deal of which is generated automatically in real time, creating a comprehensive template of your state of health is possible. The implications for this are quite far reaching, for instance, could this data be utilised to back up health insurance claims, or healthcare treatments? More advanced than these are sensor devices worn all day to monitor key health indicators including blood pressure, compliance to prescribed medical routines, physical movement and oxygen levels. These home monitors can reduce reliance on pressured healthcare services and hospital visits for chronically ill or disabled people.
For more specific health concerns, you can acquire for instance, smart contact lens, such as the Sensimed Triggerfish lenses, that monitor fluctuations in an eye’s volume to detect glaucoma. They transmit data wirelessly from the sensor to an antenna worn around the eye. For internal monitoring, there are in existence ingestible electronic devices that are pill sized, have a power supply, and a micro-processor which monitors conditions in the gastrointestinal tract, to pick up bleeds and signs of absorption of administered drug treatments.
From these examples, it is easy to imagine how your whole body can be monitored permanently for complete data on your movements, health, well-being and even perhaps, state of mind. It can act like a permanent care assistant who never sleeps. In this context, IoT has been used for a pilot study by a tech firm called IoT Solutions Group in Bournemouth in the UK, for social care for elderly and vulnerable people living alone in their homes. With a household set up with 200 hundred sensors, movements of a person can be monitored, which means when the movement levels stop for significant periods of time, an alert can be issued to carers to check on the person. They are just movement detectors so data is limited to physical activity, but it is an indicator of someone who may have had a fall, or is inactive for long periods.
A literally ‘life saving’ piece of technology in IoT can be seen in the smart helmet. Smart helmets vary depending on application, there are sports helmets for cycling and skiing, motorcycle helmets and mining helmets for example. In potentially dangerous sports, a cracked helmet can indicate a serious incident and the helmet will alert first responders to attend the location, whilst in mining scenarios, hazardous gas leaks can be detected by the smart helmets. The mining smart helmet can include multiple detecting devices, with GPS, sensors to measure humidity, temperature, a map navigation device and built-in proximity warning capabilities for detecting hazards nearby. A new motorcycle smart helmet proposed in India, even detects if the rider has had too much alcohol and will prevent the ignition of the vehicle.
Traffic control
A promising area for IoT has to be seen where the roads (or devices next to the roads) communicate with our cars, and cars in turn communicate with other cars around them. IoT could become a major force in innovation with the advancements in autonomous, self-driving vehicles which allow data on journeys to be monitored in great detail, with an emphasis on controlling the vehicle effectively and efficiently.
If we reach a time where the majority of cars are autonomous as standard, a system of intricate traffic management would be possible. At the artificial intelligence laboratory at the University of Texas, the
concept of autonomous intersection management or AIM has been floated. In a development that would spell the end for traffic lights, the self-driving cars would adjust their speed and timing to cross an intersection, however busy, at just the right moment without crashing into other cars doing the same. The researchers declared it would reduce delay by as much as 100 times at intersections and will cut fuel emissions, although it might take some getting used to, seeing other cars coming toward you from all directions, and missing you by relatively small margins.
Coming back to today, we are already at a point where we have real-time traffic congestion data available to us through Sat-Nav software, so we can plan trips accordingly, with advice relayed to us on alternative routes through the programmes. This is a form of IoT. These systems rely on the collected GPS data of many smartphones of people in cars or cars themselves, and together this data paints an accurate picture of a traffic situation, a queue forming or clearing, in near real-time – via a red line on the road. Another example can be seen when you are speeding past a traffic sign that flashes your speed up as a warning to slow down. The environment is effectively talking to you, is checking you and advising you. In the future, sensors and cameras in the street may even be able to tell your car to avoid a potential, impending accident – say a child runs into the road, which is picked up by smart tech in the street. As your autonomous car turns the corner and receives this data it can slam the breaks on or divert from collision course. Sensors along a street potentially including CCTV and motion detectors, along with people’s GPS enabled phones, could act as one to create a data portrait of changing environments in real time, becoming an omniscient set of virtual eyes and ears to make traffic safer for everyone on the road and near the road.
Flying high with IoT
As the IoT can interact with devices, it is no surprise that drones, or unmanned aircraft systems, are tipped as a fast-growing subsector of IoT. Telecoms and aviation industries are working to make beyond-visual-line-of-sight capabilities real for drones. There are huge commercial opportunities. We have by now all heard of the Amazon delivery drones (largely a PR driven story at present) as a future scenario. Drones could be deployed for so many industries and reasons, such as security & surveillance, farming, traffic management, military, search & rescue, exploration, transportation & delivery, to name a few.
The bigger picture
For now, IoT is still in its relative infancy, at least when compared to its potential and so there are some fairly substantial hurdles to overcome. This level of personal data harvesting may give rise to notions of Orwellian ‘Big Brother’ style scenarios, and that is a concern. We don’t want to be held to account by the very devices that are supposed to be making life easier or better managed and this tech will inevitably develop because it has so many opportunities for applications. Regulation, legal considerations and safeguarding will inevitably need to keep pace. One real, well understood problem with IoT is the security and privacy challenge. The openness and reach of connectivity in IoT can leave it wide open for hacks and cyberattacks. You certainly wouldn’t want your driverless car hacked. Security expert, Ken Munro, was tasked to expose the flaws in IoT devices and systems, and what he revealed was alarming holes in security and encryption that could be easily exploited. He uncovered smart fingerprint padlocks that could be unlocked via Bluetooth and worse, by hacking the cloud it was possible to find the addresses of all the locks in circulation. Similarly, it was possible to hack a brand of i-kettle and locate from one
kettle the exact locations of others. These are not minor flaws because it became evident whole IoT networks can be exposed via one compromised device. Advanced encryption techniques are necessary for advanced systems that rely on interconnectivity but for home tech manufacturers this may be prohibitive for build-costs, and the emphasis for securing devices against hacks has been squarely on the individual tech companies rather than regulators.
Beyond home technology, IoT can have profound impacts on a variety of industry sectors and processes, in everything from supply chain logistics to factory management. Curiously, farming has seen the introduction of IoT devices and sensors to automatically irrigate and control pests and diseases, and monitor crops and weather. Sensors can collect precipitation, temperature, leaf wetness and crop water demand. The data is sent to the cloud and crunched with machine learning models, in order to understand the best solutions for encouraging crop growth. Robotics in industrial use and critical infrastructure management can both benefit enormously from IoT, as the BRAIN IoT project demonstrates when networks are integrated with artificial intelligence, a project covered by EU Research. Intelligent networks of devices can compensate for bad links or faulty devices in the system without the need for an IT manager to intervene or a reboot or installation of a backup system. The enticing promise of round-the-clock autonomy and efficiency, means that industrial uses will prevail with IoT.
It is clear, a time is just around the corner, where we will live in a world where devices around us will not be passive tools anymore but will be intelligent and pro-active at fulfilling the tasks we currently see as manual. From the moment you wake up, with every move you make through the day, the environment can be aware of you, your needs and will know how to be of assistance.
