While the IoT has become
a popular phenomenon in the tech world, not many people have known about the
specifics of IoT implementations. Here’s a quick-and-dirty overview of the
wildly diverse and still evolving landscape of the IoT devices themselves,
divided for your reading pleasure into the consumer and enterprise realms.
Consumer IoT devices
The consumer side of the
IoT is mostly about inserting Internet connectivity into objects that a person
born before 1990 wouldn’t really have thought needed it – from the toaster and
refrigerator in your kitchen, to the locks on your doors, to your car and your
wristwatch.
Smart home IoT devices
are, arguably, the biggest deal on the consumer side of things – some people
really like the idea of being able to control their lights, door locks and so
on from their smartphones. Smart lightbulbs, locks and their ilk are big
business, which estimated the total revenue from their
sales at nearly $12 billion in 2018. The devices themselves have a wide range
of sophistication – a smartlock could be as simple as a device with a servo to
move the bolt and an Internet connection to a smartphone app, or as complicated
as a full-on access control system, complete with temporary virtual keys that
guests can use and logging to track access into and out of a dwelling.
It’s much the same story
with smart appliances. A simple smart toaster can notify your smartphone that
the toast is ready, while some of the fancier connected refrigerators can be
made to act as a hub for your whole kitchen. Bar code readers and cameras mean
that the fridge can tell you what’s inside, help you plan meals, and even warn
you about expiration dates. Front-mounted touchscreens can show the family’s
schedule at a glance and let you control other touchscreens in the house.
It’s worth noting that
consumer IoT devices can pose a serious security risk. Depending on how
everything’s configured, it’s possible that anyone able to access your home’s
Wi-Fi network can then access your smart devices, which is something of a big
deal if you have certain kinds of smart locks or camera-equipped devices
connected.
Enterprise/Industrial IoT devices
If anything, the
diversity of IoT devices is ratcheted up even further, when it comes to
business and industry uses. The major draw here is automation, which can save
companies money in labor costs, maintenance and a host of other areas.
Arguably the biggest and
most-established use in this area is preventive maintenance, usually in an
industrial setting. The concept is simple, but it relies on a lot of clever
computational work and careful integration. Preventive maintenance uses gadgets
like vibration and wear sensors to measure the stresses on and performance of
factory equipment. For example, in a turbine those sensors feed their data into
software running on either an edge device sitting somewhere on the factory
floor for quick communication with the endpoint or on a server somewhere in the
data center or cloud. Once there, the data can be parsed by a machine-learning
system that correlates real-time data with historical, enabling the detection
of potential reliability issues without the need for human inspection.
Fleet management’s
another popular use case for IoT devices. These systems either take advantage
of a GPS locator already installed on a car or add a new one for the purpose,
sending that data via cellular network back to the company, allowing rental car
firms or really any company with a large number of cars or trucks to keep track
of their movements. Properly equipped vehicles can even transmit data from the
sensors already present in most modern cars – things that track engine speed,
fuel temperature, battery voltage, manifold pressure, and so on – to provide a
degree of early warning on potential maintenance problems.
Enterprises that aren’t
working with heavy machinery or fleets of vehicles are still using IoT devices,
mostly for building management purposes. This is usually a question of
connecting existing sensors, including electric eyes, cameras and other
security gear to a single network, reporting back to a central console for
automated security reporting, or connecting temperature and humidity sensors
from the HVAC system to controllers for greener building environments.
But businesses that have
a lot of hardware spread across wide areas are still the most active IoT-device
users. Agriculture, for example, is another sector that’s embraced the use of
IoT with gusto – there’s a huge array of different IoT devices working in
farmers’ fields these days. Driving a combine harvester and making sure all the contents of the
field make it into the grain bin used to involve driving with your head craned
all the way around to ensure that the bin was still in formation – now, bin stays in formation automatically. Moreover, sensors in
the soil can measure pH, moisture, and nutrient levels, transmitting via
cellular service to a farmer’s laptop or tablet, which allows for a much more
in-depth understanding of soil conditions.
Healthcare technology,
too, is starting to use a lot of machine-to-machine communication, placing it
squarely in the realm of IoT. Work is afoot to connect various types of
diagnostic and monitoring devices – heart rate monitors, fingertip oxygen
monitors and so on – both with each other and with smarter back ends, to
provide improved diagnostic accuracy and cut down on alarm fatigue. For
example, a pulse oximeter that slips off a patient’s finger will give a zero
result and generally trigger an alarm, but an interconnected system can note
that no other indicators have changed and deduce that the oximeter has simply
become disconnected.
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