Rubina S Das.
Gartner research suggests that there will be 6.4 billion connected devices in 2016, and that figure will hit 20.8 billion by 2020.
Friends, welcome to the Digital Universe! Which is growing 40% a year into the next decade, expanding to include not only the increasing number of people and enterprises doing everything online, but also all the “things” (smart devices) connected to the Internet, unleashing a new wave of opportunities for businesses and people around the world. It is doubling in size every two years, and by 2020 the digital universe (the data we create and copy annually) will reach 44 zettabytes, or 44 trillion gigabytes. They go on to depict that as, enough to fill a stack of 128GB iPad Air tablets 2/3 of the way to the moon and back (157,674 miles).
The Internet of Things (IoT) fed by sensors soon to number in the trillions, working with intelligent systems in the billions, and involving millions of applications, the IoT will drive new consumer and business behaviour that will demand increasingly intelligent industry solutions, which, in turn, will drive trillions of dollars in opportunity for IT vendors and even more for the companies that take advantage of the IoT.
So let’s check the top ten innovative applications of IoT with the potential for exponential growth in this Digital Universe.
- Smart Homes / Home Automation
More than 60,000 people currently search for the term “Smart Home” each month on Google. This shouldn’t come as a surprise as more companies are active in smart home than any other application in the field of IoT. The total amount of funding for Smart Home start-ups currently exceeds $2.5bn.
So what is the definition of a smart home? In simple words a smart home is the one in which the devices have the capability to communicate with each other as well as to their intangible environment. A smart home gives owner the capability to customize and control home environment for increased security and efficient energy management.
Consumer product manufacturers like Belkin, Philips, Amazon and Haier have already established themselves as prominent companies in this market. Here are some examples of internet of things for building your own smart homes.
A. Nest Learning Thermostat
Nest Learning Thermostat is a revolutionary concept which gives you many benefits. Its breakthrough technology and internet of things based concepts make it a highly efficient electric appliance. Usually thermostats incur almost half of the energy bills. However, with Nest you can save up to 15% on cooling bills as well as 12% on heating bills on average.
B. Philips Hue-Smart Home Lighting
What is the real potential of internet of things applications for designing smart homes is aptly projected by Philips Hue. The same hue bulb gives you 600 to 800 colour lumens which mean there is a light for every mood of yours. It is compatible with known smart home platforms like HomeKit for Apple iPhone and Amazon Echo.
C. Amazon Echo
Take control of your home with your voice, this is the concept around which Amazon Echo is built. Designed to be a highly sensitive listener, Echo has 7 inbuilt microphones to hear you from across the room even among other noises. Get answers, hear news, play music, listen to audio books and integrate to other smart home devices like Philips Hue, Samsung SmartThings and WeMo. It is backed with 360º omni-directional audio.
- Wearables
Wearables are one of the hottest trends in IoT currently. Apple, Samsung, Jawbone and plenty of others all are surviving in a cut throat competition. Of all the IoT start-ups, wearables maker Jawbone is probably the one with the biggest funding to date. It stands at more than half a billion dollars!
Wearable IoT tech is a very large domain and consists of an array of devices. These devices broadly cover the fitness, health and entertainment requirements. The prerequisite from internet of things technology for wearable applications is to be highly energy efficient or ultra-low power and small sized. Here are some top examples of wearable IoT devices that fulfill these requirements.
A. Jawbone UP2
This tracker band is an excellent IoT application example in healthcare as well as wearable. It comes with features like activity tracking, food logging and sleep patterns. Also it is offered in many styles and colours. It has features like Activity Tracking, Sleep Tracking and Smart Coach.
B. Fitbit ChargeHR
Charge HR is a high performance IoT wearable which is provided with many smart features. It tracks your heart rate as well as activities sitting on your wrist. It provides you capability to automatically track heart rate, track workouts, monitor sleeping pattern, get call notifications, and synchronize data with your PC and hundreds of Smart Phones wireless and many more.
C. Motorola Moto 360 Sport
It’s time to get your healthy space personalized even without your smart phone. Motorola Moto 360 Sport is designed with this fact in mind. It delivers all the important information that you need from your phone directly. Available in men’s and women’s collection you will hardly run out of choice with this. It supports both Android as well as iOS apps.
- Smart City
Smart surveillance, safer and automated transportation, smarter energy management systems and environmental monitoring all are examples of internet of things applications for smart cities. Its popularity is fuelled by the fact that many Smart City solutions promise to alleviate real pains of people living in cities these days. IoT solutions in the area of Smart City solve traffic congestion problems, reduce noise and pollution and help make cities safer.
A. Bigbelly Smart Waste And Recycling System
Bigbelly smart waste and recycling system is a smart waste management system for smart cities. A completely modular system, Bigbelly gives historical as well as real-time and data collection capability via cloud-based service. It helps with smart trash picking, avoid overflows and generate notifications making waste management truly smart.
B. CitySense-Smart Street Lighting
Based on a patented presence-detecting technology CitySense is a smart and wireless outdoor lighting control system. With features like adaptive lighting it helps in saving electricity by intuitively adjusting brightness of streets lights based on presence of automobiles and pedestrians. It is smart enough to filter interferences like animals and trees.
C. Libelium-Metiora Smart Parking Sigfox Kit
Libelium has launch a new Smart Parking solution for Smart Cities that allows citizens to detect available parking spots. The new surface parking device -with LoRaWAN and Sigfox- features smaller size, higher accuracy and faster time of detection facilitating lower installation costs.
- Smart grids / Smart Metering
A future smart grid promises to use information about the behaviours of electricity suppliers and consumers in an automated fashion to improve the efficiency, reliability, and economics of electricity. Power grids of the future will not only be smart enough but also highly reliable. The basic idea behind the smart grids is to collect data in automated fashion and analyse the behaviour of electricity consumers and suppliers for improving efficiency as well as economics of electricity use.
A. Smart Metering
Advanced metering will make energy management easier for everyone. Landis+Gyr are a wide range of energy management products. The smart metering solution offered by Landis+Gyr consumers to better understand their energy needs as well help them with load management as well. They have many multi-energy metering solutions to offer for reliable and efficient energy management.
B. Smart Grid Management
Landis+Gyr’s grid management solutions are smart programs that provide capabilities to automate analyse as well as response to energy requirements in a smarter manner. They offer leading-edge tools that help both suppliers as well as consumers to reduce peak use problem as well increase energy use efficiency.
- Industrial internet / Industrial Control
The industrial internet is also one of the special Internet of Things applications. While many market researches such as Gartner or Cisco see the industrial internet as the IoT concept with the highest overall potential, its popularity currently doesn’t reach the masses like smart home or wearables do.
With help of internet of things infrastructure backed with advanced sensor networks, wireless connectivity, innovative hardware and machine-to-machine communication, conventional automation process of industries will transform completely.
A. Smart Structures’ Embedded Data Collector
In the construction industry it is very important to determine the quality of concrete. The EDC or Embedded Data Collector from Smart Structure helps with this big time. The system works by embedding the sensors in the concrete during pouring and curing process. This way the sensors become permanent part of the structure. They provide vital information about the strength and quality of concrete directly to the Smart Structures Work Station.
B. Libelium Waspmote Sensor Nodes
Libelium is known to prove internet of things application solution for industries. With the Waspmote Sensor Nodes accompanies with new API libraries and industrial protocol modules released by the company help easy integration of industrial devices with the cloud for data communication. Some of the supported industrial protocols are CAN Bus, RS-232 and RS-485. Application of these nodes range from automation to military to manufacturing sector.
- Connected car
Owing to the fact that the development cycles in the automotive industry typically take 2-4 years, we haven’t seen much buzz around the connected car yet. But it seems we are getting there. Most large auto makers as well as some brave start-ups are working on connected car solutions. And if the BMWs and Fords of this world don’t present the next generation internet connected car soon, other well-known giants will: Google, Microsoft, and Apple have all announced connected car platforms.
A. Latest Locomotive From GE
The latest GE Evolution Series Tier 4 Locomotive is loaded with 250 sensors to measure staggering 150,000 data points in a minute. This data combined with other incoming streams of data from informational and operating systems helps in anticipating events and help take driving decisions in real time.
B. Caterpillar’s Newest Equipment
Caterpillar is helping its dealers to succeed with help of IoT for industrial analytics. Company is harnessing data it collects from its industrial locomotives like engines, machines and tools and shares the analysed data insights with its customers. It helps them to anticipate problems, manage fleets and schedule maintenance proactively.
- Healthcare
The concept of a connected health care system and smart medical devices bears enormous potential, not just for companies also for the well-being of people in general. Yet, connected Health has not reached the masses yet. Prominent use cases and large-scale start up successes are still to be seen. Some IoT examples in this domain are:
A. Future Path Medical’s UroSense
UroSense is a smart fluid management solution offered by the Future Path Medical. It automatically measures the CBT or Core Body Temperature and urine output of patients on catheterization. Smart monitoring of these vital signs helps in avoiding infections as well as help in starting early care of medical conditions like diabetes, prostate cancer, heart failure and sepsis. UroSense can provide report data directly to nursing stations anywhere wirelessly.
B. Philips’ Medication Dispensing Service
Philips is one of those tech giants which are making full use of internet of things opportunities available for business. Medication Dispensing Service is one of the most successful IoT healthcare applications from Philips. Focused around elderly patients who find it difficult to maintain their medication dosage on their own, MDS dispenses pre-filled cups as per the scheduled dosage. It notifies automatically when it’s time to take medicine, refill, and malfunctioning or misses dosage.
- Retail
The potential of IoT in the retail sector is enormous. Imagine the scenario when your home appliances will be able to notify you about shortage of supplies or even order them all on their own. This proximity-based advertising model of smart retailing has started to become a reality. We already have internet of things application examples as part of smart supply chains. Applications for tracking goods, real time information exchange about inventory among suppliers and retailers and automated delivery all existing but with a limited reach.
A. Smart Retail Solution
TCIs’ Smart Retail Solution is based on innovative software, reliable wireless devices and ePOS Stations. Known as one of the best smart retailing solutions in the market it is powered by the Yourcegid Retail management software. Automating complex interactions of multiple sources, collecting important consumer data, creating alerts for errors on time and monitoring staff activities, Smart Retail Solution avoids costly mistakes and maximizes capital of resources.
- Agriculture
Agriculture sector needs very institutive as well as highly scalable technology solutions. Internet of things applications can deliver exactly the same to farmers. Smart farming is an often overlooked business-case for the internet of Things because it does not really fit into the well-known categories such as health, mobility, or industrial. However, due to the remoteness of farming operations and the large number of livestock that could be monitored the Internet of Things could revolutionize the way farmers work. But this idea has not yet reached large-scale attention.
A. The OpenIoT Phenonet Project
The Phenonet Project is designed to help farmers monitor crucial vitals like humidity, air temperature and soil quality using remote sensors. This project helps farmers to improve the yield, plan irrigation as well as make harvest forecasts. It is also helpful for biologists to study the effect of genome and microclimate on crop production.
B. CleanGrow’s Carbon Nanotube Probe
Based in Ireland the CleanGrow’s project helps with monitoring the crop nutrients making use of a carbon nanotube-based sensor system. This information helps farmers to alter maturity rate or colour of the crop production. As opposed to analog devices used conventionally the CleanGrow device uses a nanotube sensor that detects quantity and presence of specific ion in the production.
- Security & Emergencies
Reliability and security should never be an afterthought as they are the chief requirements to build a safe and sound country for the people. Be it a natural disaster like flood, tsunami, earthquake or an environmental change or precaution to control Radiation Levels, Ultraviolet solar radiation, innovative IoT applications could be a boon for the people. If there would have been a motto for Security and Emergency innovative IoT applications it would have been Helping save lives.
A. Smart Water: wireless sensor networks to detect floods and respond
Wireless Sensor Networks by Libelium are a cost-effective and scalable alternative for detecting early flood signs, forecasting floods, and monitoring flooding areas. Motes can be spreaded along the course of a river to measure increased water levels and generate alerts wirelessly by SMS or Internet database posting.
B. Wireless Sensor Networks to Control Radiation Levels
An autonomous battery powered Geiger Counter which can read the radiation levels automatically and send the information in real time using wireless technologies like ZigBee and GPRS. The design of the sensor board is open hardware and the source code is released under GPL.
The IoT applications discussed above is just a glimpse trying to encapsulate the opportunities in the digital universe. A lot can be done with IoT application, but it will take determination and skilled workforce to find and put to use. It will need to be protected, analysed, and acted upon.
There is an abundance of technical solutions, and successful early adopters. But organizations must adapt – and adapt fast, given that the digital universe more than doubles every two years. This era involves the computerization, adding software and intelligence, to things – things as varied as cars and toys, airplanes and dishwashers, turbines and dog collars.
So if you think that the internet has changed your life, think again. The IoT application is about to change it all over again!
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Reference Links:
- Please search for the IoT products mentioned on Google (Or any search engine) to get detailed information.
- http://www.emc.com/leadership/digital-universe/2014iview/digital-universe-of-opportunities-vernon-turner.htm
- http://www.libelium.com/resources/top_50_iot_sensor_applications_ranking/
- http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3165317
- http://internetofthingswiki.com/
https://iot-analytics.com/10-internet-of-things-applications/