“The measure of intelligence is the ability to change” -Albert Einstein
The IoT, an acronym for the Internet of Things is spreading like wildfire. It is disrupting technologies in almost all domains, be it home automation, health care, industries, avionics, air purification, smart city projects, process industries, etc, and is a unique catalyst in our march towards Industry 5.0.
IoT has been growing exponentially since the late1990’s and the positive slope of the curve is ever increasing. As I am writing this, Particle (https://www.particle.io/) in San Francisco has released a solution for indoor air purification by developing an appropriate IoT stack and is making significant contributions for fighting the Covid-19 pandemic.
The historical evolution of IoT
In the early 90s, a license was required from the Govt of India for operating radio in Indian soil. TV was just coming in and that too was requiring a similar license. The citizens of India, during those days, had to wait for months, sometimes years for getting a phone connection. I was lucky to get one, as my father was occupying a senior position in a Govt department. During those times, ours was the only phone in the locality and I used to receive and physically pass on the messages to the neighbors. On many occasions, I had to receive the call meant for the neighbor, keep the call on hold, and had to go and fetch the person.
Things started changing dramatically by the mid-90s with the advent of the internet where computers worldwide were able to communicate and exchange data with each other via the internet. Soon mobile telephony came into existence.
The technical term Internet of Things was first coined by Kevin Ashton, a British technocrat in a presentation to Proctor & Gamble in 1999, to describe a system where the Internet is connected to the physical world. From then on, IoT started growing by leaps and bounds along with AI, Data Science, Machine, and Deep Learning. AI is the new electricity; data is the new oil and IoT is the new nervous system.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is the network of physical objects or “things” embedded with electronic circuits, software, firmware, sensors, and network connectivity, which enables these objects to collect and exchange data and have control protocols
The applications
IoT has a big say in all the technological disruptions that are happening today.
A few are mentioned below:
- You can schedule and control the a/c of your office space from your smart device and set its parameters as per your requirement just as you are leaving for office so that it will be quite comfortable when you reach there.
- You can know the consumption of electrical energy at your home so far and can take corrective measures before you land up with a heavy bill.
- Elderly and incapacitated persons forced to stay alone in their homes can be monitored by their beloved ones. An alert will reach them if there is any unusual movement with them, like a fall or if their vital parameters like heartbeat, pulse rate, etc become abnormal.
- Process control engineers can monitor the vital parameters of the plant and machinery 24 x 7 and take corrective actions without physically having to go to the plant during odd hours. Thanks to IoT, preventive maintenance is getting replaced by predictive maintenance, thus saving downtime.
- A doctor can read the vital parameters of his patient in the ICU by using a smart device from the comfort of his home.
- Fleet owners can pinpoint the exact location and status of each of their vehicles as well as the driving habits.
- Using the relevant IoT stack, serpentine queues in front of service providers can be eliminated.
- IoT stack will be soon used to promote driverless autonomous vehicles.
- IoT is used to promote intelligent insurance system to do away with the traditional underwriting of policies with a smart IoT stack that will consider good driving habits, vehicle pollution, proof of incidents and accidents so that both the insurance company and the vehicle owners get benefitted.
- IoT is the main pillar behind building smart cities.
- Smart parking systems.
…. The list is endless.
The IoT of tomorrow
By the end of 2020, it is predicted that there will be 6 connected devices per person in this world! Internet of Things has entered the inter-connectivity of everything from urban transport to medical devices to household appliances. Integration with the Internet implies that devices will use an IP address as a unique identifier. However, due to the limited address space of IPv4 (which allows for 4.3 billion unique addresses), objects in the IoT will have to use IPv6 to accommodate the extremely large address space required. Objects in the IoT will not only be devices with sensory capabilities but also provide actuation capabilities.
The advent of IoT is making Industry 5.0 into a reality. Here Humans and machines will work in unison (Human-machine interaction -HMI) to improve productivity.
- Robots will get replaced by Cobots
- Dull, mundane, and repetitive jobs will be taken away from humans
- The requirement of engineers in the intelligent systems arena (IoT, AI, Deep, and Machine Learning) will increase.
I have only touched the tip of the iceberg here.
Disruption has become the new normal. The technical progress is now exponential. The question we need to ask ourselves: Are you driving change or are you driven by it? The choice is yours!
-By Dr. Ajith Chandran MC, Director-Technology (Applied Electronics & Embedded Systems).