Introduction
The Internet has been a great success over the past 20 years, growing from a small academic network into a global, ubiquitous network used regularly by over 1.4 billion people. It was the power of the Internet paradigm, tying heterogeneous networks together, the innovative World Wide Web (WWW) model of uniform resource locators (URLs), and the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) and universal content markup with the hypertext markup language (HTML) that made this possible. As the Internet of routers, servers, and personal computers has been maturing, another Internet revolution has been going on – The Internet of Things (IoT). The principles that gave rise to the Internet are now leading to a new kind of network of everyday devices!
The IoT is becoming an increasingly growing topic of conversation both in the workplace and outside of it. It’s a concept that not only has the potential to impact how we live but also how we work. The IoT aims to seamlessly integrate all aspects of one’s life into useful, manageable data. The IoT is the future of technology that can make our lives more efficient.
So what is the IoT?
Simply put this is the concept of basically connecting any device with an on and off switch to the Internet (and/or to each other). This includes everything from cell phones, coffee makers, washing machines, headphones, lamps, wearable devices and almost anything else you can think of. This also applies to components of machines, for example a jet engine of an airplane or the drill of an oil rig. The IoT is a giant network of connected devices or “things” (which also includes people). The relationship will be between people-people, people-things, and things-things.
Why does the IoT make your life comfortable?
The impact that the IoT has had on the world has been significant – and it’s only getting started. Just imagine that you are on your way to a meeting, your car could have access to your calendar and already know the best route to take, if the traffic is heavy your car might send a text to the other party notifying them that you will be late. What if your alarm clock wakes you up at 6 a.m. and then notifies your coffee maker to start brewing coffee for you? What if your office equipment knew when it was running low on supplies and automatically re-ordered more? What if the wearable device you used in the workplace could tell you when and where you were most active and productive and shared that information with other devices that you used while working?
What are the benefits of IoT?
The IoT is more than just a convenience for consumers. It offers new sources of data and business operating models that can boost productivity in a variety of industries. The reality is that the IoT allows for virtually endless opportunities and connections to take place, many of which we can’t even think of or fully understand the impact of today. It’s not hard to see how and why the IoT is such a hot topic today, it certainly opens the door to a lot of opportunities.
The IoT may give a significant economic benefit from analyzing resulting data streams. In the Internet of Things (IoT), devices gather and share information directly with each other and the cloud, making it possible to collect, helps record and analyze new data streams faster and more accurately. That suggests all sorts of interesting possibilities across a range of industries:
- Energy saving (I2E) and smart electric grids (more efficiently connect renewable resources, improve system reliability and charge customers based on smaller useage increments).
- Transportation and connected vehicles (reduce fuel consumption, prioritize vehicle repair schedules, and save lives).
- Predictive maintenance in industry (near-term part stockouts, prioritize maintenance crew schedules for repair equipment and regional needs).
- Smart home (remote control of locks and thermostats, cooling down your home and open your windows, based on your preferences).
- Smart cities (making easier for municipalities to run waste management, law enforcement and other programs more efficiently).
- IoT related Healthcare systems (remote monitoring systems which collect, analyze data and send it to the cloud).
Where is the Future of the IoT?
As the technology for collecting, analyzing and transmitting data in the IoT continues to mature, we’ll see more and more exciting new IoT-driven applications and systems emerge. Connectivity Standards represent an inherent challenge for any environment in which a large number of complex devices need to communicate with each other—which is exactly the case for the IoT in healthcare. One analyst has described the “…greater standardization of communications protocols…” as critical to advancing the adoption of the IoT.
Fortunately, standards organizations are working now to create guidelines for wireless communications between devices. For instance, The Continua Health Alliance a coalition of healthcare and technology companies that was founded in 2006 to establish guidelines for interoperable personal health solutions. Furthermore, a consortium of industrial giants, including AT&T, Cisco, General Electric, IBM and Intel would cooperate to create engineering standards to connect objects, sensors and large computing systems in some of the world’s largest industrial assets, like oil refineries, factories or harbors. The group, called the Industrial Internet Consortium, hopes to establish common ways that machines share information and move data. Creating standards for things like the electricity levels within small machines, or the kinds of radio technology a railroad might use to signal track conditions, can increase the size of the potential market and speed product development.
The vision behind the Internet of Things is that embedded devices, also called smart objects, are universally becoming IP enabled, and an integral part of the Internet. Examples of embedded devices and systems using IP today range from mobile phones, personal health devices and home automation, to industrial automation, smart metering and environmental monitoring systems. The scale of the Internet of Things is already estimated to be immense, with the potential of trillions of devices becoming IP enabled. The impact of the Internet of Things will be significant, with the promise of better environmental monitoring, energy savings, smart grids, more efficient factories, better logistics, better healthcare and smart homes.
So what can Sirin Software offer you?
Conversations about the IoT are (and have been for several years) taking place all over the world and we begin to understand how this will impact our lives. We understand how many opportunities and challenges there are going to be as more and more devices start to join the IoT. Sirin Software can help you to make your life more comfortable at your workplace or local (home) environment with both kinds of IoT Consumer and Industrial IoT. For instance, If your company is going to create smart grids we can make a system architecture, which includes the wireless interactions with other components and/or humans, and of course, security solutions. We offer the development of home and industrial supply chain applications; their common feature is to combine embedded sensory objects with communication intelligence, running data over a mix of wired and wireless networks. In fact, we offer complete solutions from concept to implementation from a single reliable source.