Internet of Things (IoT)
We are living in an era of an increasingly interconnected world. Our lives are tightly coupled with devices that remain online 24-7-365. More and more devices are getting connected every day and it is estimated that by 2020 more than 20 billion devices will be interconnected.
The biggest buzzword Internet of things (IoT), emerged as technologists see that many benefits can be extracted with these connected devices. IoT is not a new concept, it’s about utilizing the data generated by already interconnected devices to simplify the existing processes and drive innovation.
Our devices are generating more and more data than ever before. According to IBM, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data is generated every day and 90% of all data available today is generated in last two years alone. This raw data is the currency upon which the whole empire of IoT stands. This data is used in analysis and calculation that can further be used in making efficient decisions.
IoT won’t be possible without the advent of IPv6 (a 128 bit IP addressing scheme). With IPv6 we will have a pool of IP addresses that will allow every atom on the earth to have an IP address or we can say that everything on this earth can be connected to the internet. This is IoT, connecting physical devices to the internet. IoT in simple words is physical devices fitted with Wireless Sensors connected to the cloud via the internet.
With the advent of IoT, everything will be smart. Our homes will turn into smart homes, buildings into smart buildings and cities into smart cities. It will be a smart world altogether.
Next, we see how IoT is affecting the different aspect of our lives.
Home automation is perhaps the most exciting part of IoT. You will be living in a smart home where your thermostat will know in advance that you are arriving in next five minutes; it will adjust the home temperature before your arrival. Your smart home security system will alert you on your mobile device, if there is suspicious activity at your home, your refrigerator will tell you when the supply of eggs is going to be exhausted.
There are many home automation devices available, one of the most popular device from Amazon is Amazon Echo Dot Second Generation, based on Alexa voice service. It’s a small device that can be placed in any of your room. When integrated with your home automation, it can help you in controlling lights, temperature of your room and even playing music by your voice alone. You can turn on lights of your room by simply saying ‘Alexa, turn on the lights’.
IoT in Health Care
If you talk with technologists working in healthcare about how future hospitals will look like, they will shock you by saying that we will have less number of hospitals in days to come. It is human nature that we all want to stay away from hospitals no matter what disease we have, while adequate health facilities are available only within hospital premises. IoT has a solution to fill this gap. Patients with less critical diseases will be equipped with sensors that will monitor their pulse rate, sugar level, blood pressure and send it back to the hospital, where they will be monitored by nursing staff. In case some alarm is generated, the patient will be contacted and will be given necessary instructions or if necessary will be called at the hospital for further treatment. This will help in reducing the number of patients visiting the hospital, which in turn will allow doctors to focus on patients with critical diseases.
USA in 2014, spent 3 trillion dollars on health care which amounts to 10,000 US dollar per person annually, this eats a considerable part of GDP. The same portion is spent by other developed countries. IoT will help in cutting down this mass spending on healthcare, most of which go wasted.
Another key benefit of IoT is reducing the downtime of medical equipment installed at hospitals like Ultrasound, PET scanners and X-ray machines. They will no more operate in isolation; rather they will have sensors connected to the cloud. This will allow remote monitoring of these machines by supplier around the clock. In this way, preemptive measures will be taken to fix the problem in the machine before it goes down. That’s IoT solution to maintain maximum uptime of machines.
These are just a few examples of how IoT will benefit our lives. There is no aspect of human life that won’t be affected by IoT. Though there are some social concerns about this technology that IoT will breach human privacy and technologists are working to address this issue. Nonetheless, this smart world concept will cater our future needs in much simplified and better way.