IoT Innovation, Issue 2

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IoT INNOVATION JUNE 2016 | #2

THE INTERNET OF THINGS:: DESIGNERS NEEDED /8

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Machine Learning: The Brains Behind AI

The Rise Of The Industrial Internet Of Things

The world may not be ready for AI quite yet, but businesses certainly need to prepare for machine learning as it begins to take hold / 10

The industrial Internet of Things is driving progress for manufacturing and other industries, yet the consumer market is currently lagging behind / 12

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ISSUE 2

EDITOR’S LETTER Welcome to the 2nd Edition of the Internet of Things Magazine

When people think of the Internet of Things (IoT), the tendency is to envisage a world of devices designed to make daily life easier, particularly in the home. The image is one of appliances that restock themselves, thermostats with inbuilt machine learning, smart food and other equally imaginative applications.

Now that the initial excitement has passed, though, the dust has started to settle and the real-world applications of the IoT are beginning to take shape. The home will be affected, yes - which Matthew Reaney explores in this issue - but the uses for connected devices will find perhaps their most notable influence in the world of industry and business. We explore how the former has far surpassed the consumer market in terms of actual application of the technology, and George Hill explains its rise.

The world’s biggest cities, too, will be significantly affected by the immense potential of the IoT. Automation in ‘smart’ cities will certainly make the lives of city dwellers easier, but there is a danger that the extent of the automation could render its beneficiaries stupid. James Ovenden looks at the dangers of a city run by ‘smart’ machines.

Though for these machines to truly be considered ‘smart’, they will have to utilize some kind of machine learning. If the ultimate goal of big data is that technology will eventually teach itself, the considerable investment being shovelled into machine learning is set to drive it in the right direction, and David Barton discusses how companies should prepare themselves for its eventual ubiquity and how best to exploit its value.

Also in this issue, Laura Denham explores how appealing design will be the key to the IoT taking hold on the consumer market, Emma Taylor explains the benefits of ensuring your supply is ready for the IoT revolution, and Alice Atkinson-Bonasio looks at the immediate future of the technology.

It is important to limit hype when it comes to new tech, and it’ll take a while for the home to be revolutionized. But, with real-world applications becoming ever-clearer, expect to become a lot more familiar with the IoT in the coming years.

As always, if you have any comment on the magazine or you want to submit an article, please contact me at csammonds@theiegroup.com.

Charlie Sammonds managing editor

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Data-Driven Product Innovation Summit June 29 & 30, 2016 | Austin, TX

Speakers Include

+1 415 614 4191 jc@theiegroup.com www.theinnovationenterprise.com

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contents 6 | WILL SMART CITIES MAKE US DUMB?

15 | GETTING YOUR SUPPLY CHAIN IOT READY

Smart cities and automation are undoubtedly going to make our lives easier, but is easy always good? Will it render us all stupid?

The IoT is expected to have a pronounced impact on the supply chain, and organizations should already be positioning themselves to exploit it

8 | THE INTERNET OF THINGS: DESIGNERS NEEDED

There is an argument that in order for the Internet of Things to grow quickly, designers must be at the heart of development, but is this necessarily the case?

10 | MACHINE LEARNING: THE BRAINS BEHIND AI

The world may not be ready for AI quite yet, but businesses certainly need to prepare for machine learning as it begins to take hold 12 | THE RISE OF THE INDUSTRIAL INTERNET OF THINGS

The industrial Internet of Things is driving progress for manufacturing and other industries, yet the consumer market is currently lagging behind

managing editor charlie sammonds creative director charlotte weyer atkinson-bonasio, emma taylor

18 | BIG DATA WILL RULE YOUR HOME

As ‘smart’ devices in the home become more sophisticated, it is only a matter of time before the adoption curve accelerates and homes become connected.

21 | WHAT’S NEXT FOR THE INTERNET OF THINGS?

The IoT will extend far further than smart fridges and Nest, and Canadian companies are bringing innovation to the IoT arena WRITE FOR US

Do you want to contribute to our next issue? Contact: ghill@theiegroup.com for details

| assistant editor james ovenden | | contributors laura denham, george hill, matthew reaney, alice

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Will Smart Cities Make Us Dumb?

James Ovendon, Assistant Editor

JG BALLARD ONCE SAID, ‘I could sum up the future in one word, and that word is 'boring.' The future is going to be boring.’ I would go one further, and say the future could cause stupidity too.

Technology has undeniably made our lives easier, and for many in poorer communities it has enabled lives to continue, period. But has it made them more interesting? And as progress marches inexorably on, what does this really mean for human beings and our ability to innovate?

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The global urban population has risen to 54% of the total population and is set to rise to over 66% by 2050. As data points are added across cities, and Internet of Things technology is incorporated into planning systems, we are seeing the rise of so-called smart cities. Smart cities are far better equipped to deal with the massive increase in migration set to take place in coming years.

Smart cities use intelligent transport systems, and they are administered by integrated urban command centers, which leverage big data gathered from citizens to manage every aspect of urban life and ensure it runs smoothly.

Examples of this are already being seen across the world, with many major cities making their data open to the public to facilitate better innovation and understanding about where technologies can be introduced to improve performance. For example, Chicago has used data analytics to pinpoint where to place bait for rats by listing which dumpsters are most likely to be overflowing. According to Schenk, this has seen the city become 20% more efficient in controlling rats. Many newer cities, particularly in China, are being built from the ground up as smart cities, which mean they are built automation ready. Automation could run public utilities and transportation

systems with amazing efficiency, that is undeniable. But while such cities may seem like a utopia, there are real concerns.

The cities of the future could bring about something far more dangerous than delayed rat catchers and inefficient lighting systems - it could bring about an epidemic of boredom and introduce in the population a feeling that they are being controlled.

As we enter an automated future, in which city functions glide seamlessly into one another and we slip effortlessly through our daily lives, we are almost pushed from place to place, the soul of the city is abandoned.

Italo Calvino wrote in Invisible Cities, ‘Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.’ Could someone write this about a city where predictive algorithms have taken control of the sewer system?

In their pursuit of smart cities, planners risk blindly pursuing convenience and efficiency at the expense of decades of research by architects, geographers, urban planners, designers and sociologists. There is every chance that this could lead to a dystopian future where humans lose agency. Philipp Schuster, MD of Loxone UK, notes that ‘If citizens are forced into a certain way of adopting it could lead to 'Orwellian Panopticonism' attitudes, in which people can feel controlled and constantly watched.’ And it’s not just in cities that people appear to be dropping the ball when it comes to failing to consider the consequences of blindly implementing data - the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) needs to be carefully monitored if it is work.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been in the news a lot of late, with Microsot’s chatbot ‘Tay’ going off the reservation and contorting into a racist, holocaust-denying, monster before being eventually pulled. If engineers are going to allow AI to learn qualitatively from humans, it will end up representative of the lowest common denominator. There is a great diversity in people’s refined and moral and intelligent interests, but people’s vulgar and prurient and stupid interests tend to be the same. Likewise, the masses also tend to share far more fears than they do hopes and aspirations. Therefore, when AI looks to learn from the general population by basing itself on the personality of the average person, it will incorporate these vulgar interests and base fears. The real danger of AI is not that in trying to replicate ourselves in machines we will create a race of superbeings that wipe us out, it’s that we will create a race of machines than spend its entire time doing the inane things we do ourselves on a daily basis.

In such a world, marginal interests are pushed even further to the fringe.

The impact on human consciousness of a society that so constantly provides for the normal and expected - the expected action, the normal thought, the predictable movement - should not be underestimated. The outsider is shunned already, and in a world where cities and AI account only for the normal will grind even more from them. The would-be maverick is crushed completely, pushed around the city in which they live without having to ever think.

It may seem unlikely, but is the idea that we become so reliant on automation that we lose common sense?

After all, would the children of today know how to get somewhere if they didn’t have their phones telling them?

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the Internet of Things: Designers Needed Laura Denham - Data Evangelist

JONY IVE came to start using a Mac because he found that the interface on other computers was confusing to him.

Although not perfect, the system created

by Apple allowed him to use the computer effectively, however, it wasn't until the 90's that he was hired by the company. In 1996 he became the head of design and in 1998 the iMac began the reinvention of the failing company.

18 years later and Apple have changed the way that people use technology - not because they have the best programmers or engineers, but because in Jony Ive they have one of the world's best designers.

The Internet of Things is set to become the next big societal shift and we need to make sure that we are creating a system where the best designers are designing, rather than engineers and data scientists.

It may seem counter-intuitive, but it is likely to create the best possible products, which will in turn create the kind of products that will be used more effectively. /8

Through creating products that are more appealing to consumers, the spread of connected devices will increase and their usefulness, business potential and ROI will increase on products. In turn, this is likely to lead to increased profitability for the companies involved, and thus advances in product variety and numbers in the future.

It is an argument put forward by Neue Labs, who create toolkits for building wearable technology and smart devices, in a recent piece in Creative Review. The point that the IoT needs to have designers at its core is certainly true to some degree, but perhaps is looking a little too much at form over function and not looking at what is really going to drive the IoT; Data.

We have seen that the trend in industrial design, especially in connected devices, has been to focus on the data showing how products are being used, then improving the next model with it. We can look to companies like Ford and Nike, who have both been utilizing data to design better products as prime examples. An explanation of why this has been done, and why data scientists need to be at least as influential as designers is clear from a quote from Hannah Jones, Nike's vice-president of sustainable business and innovation - 'There's a lot of talk about how much we need data, but actually we need the right data, and we use some serious analytics behind it to turn it into value creation.'

It is very much about creating and collecting the correct data, rather than making 'a wall of LED lights that creates different patterns with an open SDK' as Neue Labs suggests. Sure, it might look good, but the true value of the IoT needs to come from the analysis of data to optimize tasks. At least in its formative years as a mass-market function, the importance of data cannot be overstated as it will be setting the agenda for everything that comes after it.

Therefore a balance needs to be struck in exactly the same way that Jony Ive has created his products, with 'form follows function.'

The form is what will make more people use the product, but the function is what will make it genuinely useful. One without the other won't work. The sale of smart thermostats would not have increased by 105% between 20142015 if they looked bad and had poor UX design. But equally, if they simply looked good on the wall but had only basic functionality, they would have struggled to grow too.

So we need designers for the predicted 34 billion connected devices in 2020, but they need to be balanced with those who can create the functionality from a data perspective, be able to collect it, store it and analyze it. One without the other simply won't work, just ask Jony Ive.

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MACHINE LEARNING: THE BRAINS BEHIND AI David Barton - IoT Commentator WHEN THE AVERAGE PERSON on the street hears the words Artificial Intelligence, they usually think sentient robots coming to take their job, and potentially their life. Which is understandable, partly because films like Terminator have conditioned us to think like that, and partly because it could well be true. Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk say it might happen, and they’re very rarely wrong about anything. When people hear Machine Learning, on the other hand, the tendency is not so much to grab a weapon and hide under the bed until the robot apocalypse comes. It’s to express a healthy reverence for how such algorithms will benefit technology and make our lives easier.

The definition of AI is a broad one. According to Ram Sriharsha, senior architect and machine learning expert at Big Data Hadoop distribution company Hortonworks, ‘Machine Learning is a subset of AI. AI is being able to communicate, being able to plan and reason and take actions. It's also being able to learn, and that's where machine learning comes in.’ Fundamentally, / 10

Machine Learning is algorithms that teach a computer to search for certain answers in datasets by itself, and discover patterns that can help regularly improve performance and behaviors. It sits at the heart of AI, which then incorporates other elements, such as natural language processing and understanding, to bring it closer to mimicking human intelligence.

The ultimate goal of big data, and technology in general, is that it will eventually teach itself

The ultimate goal of big data, and technology in general, is that it will eventually teach itself. While traditional analytics tools are limited by their inability to deal with data past a certain volume and the need for humans to specify program execution, machine learning can process and analyze the volume, velocity and variety of both structured and unstructured data in the way needed for big data to reach its full potential.

Machine Learning algorithms are already playing a part in many every day technologies, including the speech recognition by Apple’s Siri and Facebook’s controversial facial recognition technology.

They are also the key technology behind Google’s self-driving cars.

The major tech companies are all investing heavily in machine learning as part of their various AI drives.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai says that, ‘Machine learning is a core, transformative way by which we’re re-thinking about how we’re doing everything. We are thoughtfully applying it across all our products, be it search, ads, YouTube, or Play.

And we’re in early days, but you will see us — in a systematic way — apply machine learning in all these areas.’ In terms of the consumer market, the advantages for making life easier are clear. For businesses, machine learning is vital for sensing and reacting to dynamic, distributed phenomena in such a way that guides forward-looking business decisions.

The world may not be ready for AI quite yet, but businesses certainly need to prepare for machine learning. Big data has promised much since its emergence as a buzzword, and you may think it’s delivered, but machine learning should leave any organizational gains you may have made using data look like specs of dust in comparison.

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The Rise Of The Industrial Internet Of Things.

GEORGE HILL, EDITOR IN CHIEF

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21 billion devices will be connected to the internet by 2018, each creating data that needs to be stored and analyzed effectively

WHEN PEOPLE THINK ABOUT the Internet of Things (IoT), it is usually in terms of a thermostat that automatically sets, a fridge that can tell how much food is in it, or lights that automatically turn on and off. So when people talk about the importance of it for our future, many greet the idea with scepticism.

However, the truth is that the real power of IoT will not initially be in how it is used by regular consumers, but instead how companies can use it on an industrial scale.

One of the industries that is already using this to great effect is oil and gas. More than almost any other business, aside from perhaps water and electricity, they need to maintain equipment over the largest area.

Unlike the others where a water leak might cause a puddle, or a break in electrical lines might short circuit a neighborhood, if there is a fault in an oil line, it can create a huge environmental disaster.

There are around 100,000 miles of oil pipelines in the US alone and trying to manage this through traditional means is hazardous, time consuming and wasteful. However, by using the IoT, companies can maintain control and view potential issues from a central location and send maintenance teams when needed. It also allows them to take pre-emptive action to either block the pipeline in the case of an emergency, or fix problems before they occur.

Mel Christopher, Senior Director of Gas Systems Operations at Pacific Gas & Electric told PTC about how they used the IoT to avert a potential disaster: ‘In late September 2015, three huge fires, the Valley, Butte, and Rough Fires, were close to our pipelines and facilities. We used TAMI to monitor the movement of the fire lines and the wind direction, and it provided alerts whenever the fire line was within a certain distance of a facility. This would trigger an isolation plan we had already built using data from TAMI [their IoT data system].’

Other companies are already taking advantage of the new technology, with Thames Water in the UK being a prime example. The company were an early adopter of the technology and having embarked on a data driven, sensor led programme are reaping the rewards. Now they can find and repair leakages in half the time they could previously, and have reduced leakage from their network by a third.

It is not only in the utility sector that the IoT can have a significant impact, it can has significant positive implications for many industries across the world. Research from Accenture has shown that predictive maintenance alone generates savings of up to 12% over regular maintenance. This then leads to a 30% reduction in maintenance costs and 70% reduction in down time.

The development of the industrial IoT means that sensors are being created to track almost anything, from the emissions of a lorry through to the wear on factory machinery.

With this kind of data available, it also means that more can be stored and mined to find improvements for the future, decreasing the errors of margin and creating a more efficient system.

The initial reaction to the consumer IoT may have been muted, but we are increasingly seeing that its use at an industrial level is already having a huge impact. The beauty of it is that the more it is used the better it will get, so who knows where we could get to in the future.

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Chief Data Officer Summit

December 7 & 8 | New York

Speakers include: Roy Asterley +1 415 692 5426 rasterley@theiegroup.com www.theinnovationenterprise.com

Getting Your Supply Chain IoT Ready Emma Taylor - IOT Commentator ACCORDING TO ANALYST FIRM Gartner Group, the number of connected devices will increase thirty-fold by 2020 to 29 billion. Cisco estimates that the number will be even greater, predicting that there will be in excess of 50 billion devices by then. This is set to have a tremendous impact on productivity and the economy as a whole, providing a boost up to $6.2 trillion by 2025. General Electric alone have estimated that it will bring about a 1% improvement in productivity across its global manufacturing base, which translates to roughly $500 million in annual savings.

One area where its impact is expected to be most pronounced is in the supply chain, helping to transform processes and allow for more accurate and timely stock replenishment, better equipment monitoring, and helping to trace cargo more precisely.

For organizations to fully exploit the benefits of IoT in their supply chains, they need to prepare for implementation now. According to

Mark Wilkinson, SAS regional VP for Northern Europe and Russia/CIS, ‘Just under half of UK businesses are not using any form of big data analytics, and those that are will sometimes be using it infrequently in just one or a few areas of the business. Less than one in three have adopted IoT.’ While IoT technologies are yet to fully mature, and new applications will emerge thick and fast for the next decade, early adopters stand a far greater

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chance of leveraging it for a competitive edge. Those who hold off, meanwhile, will likely flounder and lose out.

Companies should first pinpoint the opportunities that IoT can bring about. In terms of increasing supply chain visibility, it will provide a particular advantage, and companies need to prepare for the increased expectations from partners for real time information. They also need to have the technology in place that can deal with IoT and the data it will produce.

The cloud offers a scalable environment which best suits the size of the datasets, while firms also need to find a tool that can integrate the IoT across multiple platforms and streamline data.

Everything that can be connected to the Internet can be hacked, and IoT devices are particularly vulnerable because the market is growing so rapidly

The tools need to be in place that can make use of the speed that IoT enables, so a shared platform where insights can be viewed by decision makers in real time is a good place to start. Things also need to change on an industry level before IoT can really be adopted. There are currently many systems and machines producing data, but a limited number that actually allow for the exchange and store information in the standardized way needed for adoption of IoT solutions at scale. Standards need to be in place for the format of data emanating from sensors. This will require a wholescale effort on behalf of industries to coalesce around data standards, such as MT Connect and OPC-UA. Without these, it will be impossible to automate basic supply chain decisions.

Another important consideration is cyber security. Everything that can be connected to the Internet can be hacked, and IoT devices are particularly vulnerable because the market is growing so rapidly, and the pressure for organizations to bring products out as quickly as possible often means sacrificing proper security practices.

To minimize risks, organizations need to close backdoor access by understanding devices’ vulnerabilities and how they connect to other systems in ways that could leave those exposed.

IoT is still early in its lifecycle, but both the complexity that comes with implementation means that staying ahead of the game is the best way to reap the benefits.

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Want to contribute?

channels.theinnovationenterprise.com/authors contact ghill@theiegroup.com / 17

Matthew Reaney - Founder, Big Cloud

BIG DATA WILL RULE YOUR HOME

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BIG DATA IS COMING to a room near you. In fact, it could well be the very room you are sitting in at the moment.

The 'connected home' is the next frontier for Big Data, and with ever more sophisticated devices and faster broadband, the day may not be far away that our lives are significantly impacted by the analytical firepower of the Internet of Things.

Home security, energy management, domestic chores, entertainment and even health monitoring will be amongst the activities, which will be seamlessly integrated into our lives (whether we like it, or not). A vast network of inter-connected 'smart' devices will share information in the background – your smart watch will inform your partner of your estimated arrival time, your bath will start running at exactly the right moment and at the right temperature, and your smart plates will calculate exactly what food is on them and how many calories you will be consuming. You get the idea.

There are some potentially serious issues with privacy here. If you find it disconcerting that your every move on the internet can be tracked, imagine the consequences of your home life being dissected. If the bathroom scales tip over a certain point, you could get a call from the local weight loss class. Current employers could track your sleeping habits, so no more late night box set binges that would be detrimental to your performance and utterly irresponsible. On a more sinister note, if organised crime got into 'home hacking', how easy would it be to turn all these devices against you?

When something happens at the click of a button, there is always a minute danger of malfunction or meddling. At least, when you lock your door behind you, you know that there is a physical barrier to entry.

If people can hack the Pentagon (it happened), then what is stopping someone from hacking your home?

All these questions are deeply disturbing, and they will certainly make people pause before adopting this technology en masse. The home is your personal space where you can escape the worries of the outside world. If you let the outside world in, where then is your psychological refuge?

How do you think a more analytical approach could benefit your home life. What would your gadgets say if they could 'talk'? How could they make your lives more fulfilling?

These sorts of questions will come into the public space sooner than we realize.

As with everything, when the benefits outweigh the risks, the adoption curve will accelerate. I would argue that the tech isn’t quite up to the task at the moment, but in a few years time, the 'connected home' is inevitable.

How would you then feel if your fridge locks you out because your scales and wearables have sounded the warning signs?

THE STATS BY 2019... companies will ship 1.9 billion connected home devices, bringing in about $490 billion in revenue.

BY 2020... the number of IoT Devices will outnumber the current population, according to Cisco.

AND.... over 20% of US consumers will own smart refrigerators and smart watches.

Internet of Things Summit Speakers Include

Boston September 8 & 9, 2016

+ 1 415 614 4191 jc@theiegroup.com www.theinnovationenterprise.com

WHAT’S NEXT FOR THE INTERNET OF THINGS?

That is not to say that it won’t happen, though. Experts disagree on the exact size of this potential market, but predictions for the next 10 years’ growth tend to be in multi-trillion dollar range. Just like mobile and smartphone adoption, we’re essentially waiting for the tipping point where these technologies will be good enough, simple enough, and affordable enough to become pervasive.

Alice Atkinson-Bonasio Strategic Communications Consultant WHENEVER WE TALK about the next big trends in tech, Internet of Things and Wearables always come up. The promise of a boom has, however, failed to materialize (excuse the slight pun).

In the meantime, many companies are hard at work innovating in that space, and many of them cluster in what might seem an unlikely corner of the world: Canada’s British Columbia province. Those lucky enough to have visited its capital Vancouver will know that there’s more to it than stunning scenery and wildlife. In terms of film and TV production, the city is the third largest centre in North America,

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losing out only to New York and Los Angeles. It is also home to thousands of IT companies, earning it the nickname ‘Silicon Valley North’.

The government of the province is keen to promote this fact, which is why it brought a delegation of its rising tech stars across the pond to tech events. Looking at the DNA of some of these, a pattern of innovation in the IoT space emerges that suggests that it might be worth keeping an eye on the region. It is, after all, home to Sierra, the world’s largest machine-to-machine wireless company. The company was recently tipped as one of the top Canadian tech stocks to watch as it has squarely positioned itself in the middle of the sector. It specializes in creating embedded wireless modules that can fit into various objects, enabling network connectivity. Crucially, however, Sierra also invested in data analytics and cloud computing. These are the elements that can render those connected devices ‘smart’ and where the real game-changing possibilities lie.

Security then becomes a much bigger issue in that scenario, as it is clearly important to protect this myriad of personal devices against tampering, but it is impractical to embed each one with a separate security mechanism. Wedge Networks, based in Calgary, has developed a cloud-based cybersecurity solution that protects the entire network rather than requiring users to download and update software to individual devices. They predict that as the Internet of Things becomes more prevalent, the demand for this type of Security as a Service (SECaaS) will soar to an estimated $30 billion by 2020.

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When people discuss how the Internet of Things will transform our homes and lives, they often have a hard time going beyond Nest or Smart Fridges that can tell you when you’ve run out of milk and order some for you. But the more interesting IoT applications probably won’t require you to purchase specific new devices or learn to operate them. They should gradually and seamlessly integrate into existing technologies and incrementally bring the physical and virtual world together.

One example of how this can work is the way Eventbase is using bluetooth Beacons. These low-energy flexible devices can be placed in any location and programmed to interact with smartphones and wearables. This meant that by placing one of those beacons inside a plant pot on a table, a conference attendee at last year’s Cannes Lions festival could order a complimentary glass of wine on their Apple Watch and have it delivered to their exact location in less than a minute.

On a similar vein, another coin-sized device named Linquet promises to make losing your valuables a thing of the past, allowing you to attach it to pretty much anything and then program it to alert you whenever an item moves out of a certain range.

Again, the implications of building a smart network of such connected and programmable devices brings many tantalizing possibilities. The company already suggest that you could attach the device to a pet’s collar, for example, to prevent it wandering off. In future, however, could we make this technology small enough to include in microchips, so that we could locate lost pets automatically without the need for them to be handed into a vet and scanned?

the more interesting IoT applications probably won’t require you to purchase specific new devices or learn to operate them

the implications of building a smart network of such connected and programmable devices brings many tantalizing possibilities

Embedded sensors are definitely a trend with many interesting applications, such as the one developed by SoudOfMotion. Their inexpensive $50 sensor that can be mounted into shoes, limbs, oars, paddles and other equipment to track progress for both amateur and professional athletes. By using the Earth’s magnetic pole to measure pivotal motion, it works like a compass to provide much more accurate and reliable and granular data to help people improve their sporting technique.

This all goes to show the possibilities as the technology scales up, as many of these are effectively prototypes. The Internet of Things is effectively in its infancy, but if the steepness of the mobile growth curve is anything to go by, we should brace for exponential growth, and looking at these early innovators provides a tantalising glimpse of what’s to come.

It is easy to see how in the future these types of functionalities will be built into devices and automatically connected to networks. One company that demonstrates how that could work is ThinkEco Power, which developed a way to monitor household appliances without the need to install additional tracking devices. A sensor attached to a power cable can read the harmonics whenever an appliance is turned on, a processor reads the signature, and an algorithm deciphers which appliance it relates to. By learning people’s activity patterns, this sort of technology could be used to help prevent elderly and disabled people dying unnecessarily or suffering a stroke, heart attack or a preventable accident in their home. It means a person’s activity – or inactivity – can be monitored, so if regular actions such turning the TV and radio on, using equipment such as a walking assistant, turning on a hearing aid or even boiling the kettle fail to take place, a notification can be sent to a relative, neighbour, or even the emergency services. Further uses could see it detecting fire or CO hazards and turning off the mains to prevent further damage.

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