Tech frontiers primer: The Internet of Things
IT PROMISES PLENTY, BUT IT ALSO HAS A DARKER SIDE TROUBLING MANY TECH PROFESSIONALS. HERE’S EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE RISE OF THE INTERNET OF THINGS.
AN INTERCONNECTED MESH of gadgets and devices designed to ultimately make your life better — from improving health to ordering your next box of laundry detergent. Welcome to the world of the ‘Internet of Things’ where every device and gadget connects to the internet to monitor your every need — or so goes the double-choc-coated public-relations version of this tech. But what actually is the ‘Internet of Things’, how does it work, what does it do and why are so many people worried about it?
THE FIVE PILLARS
When PCs first hit the market in the early 1980s, they were hugely expensive. Even during the mid-1990s, an early Intel Pentium desktop computer, with less processing power than you’ll find in a cheap pre-paid smartphone from your local supermarket, could set you back as much as $8,000. But as with almost everything else, time, growing competition and improvements in production steadily dragged down costs. Computer chips grew in speed as they shrank in size and price, while, equally as important, we began to measure chip power consumption less in ‘tens of watts’ and more in single-digits and even milli-watts (thousandths of a watt) as those improvements added up.
Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) devices of the early-2000s such as the HP/Compaq iPaq handhelds gave way to smartphones and instead of just one processor chip inside your device, you now had several, all performing different tasks. Today’s smartphones have multiple processors running your applications, but also dedicated chips handling phone calls and wireless connectivity — even capturing your photos.
These special single-task processors or ‘microcontrollers’ have been around in various forms for more than 20 years. But as their processing speed, features, power consumption and cost all now start hitting the right notes, they’re helping create a world of ‘smart devices’ able to connect to the internet and send and receive data. But in order to do that, they need the second piece of this jigsaw in the form of new low-cost wireless networking technology. Laptop computers have had built-in Wi-Fi for years, but until quite recently, it was still a comparatively expensive tech. Today, you can buy a complete Wi-Fi adapter on a tiny chip for $2, or in a module the size of an SD card for under $7. Bluetooth is a common alternative for creating device-to-device wireless connections, with ‘Bluetooth Low-Energy’ (BLE) now a popular option for around the same price.
The third jigsaw piece is the wave of low-cost micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) sensors that measure everything from sound and light to air pressure, temperature, humidity, magnetic fields, heart rates, acceleration, gravity and more. There are sensors to measure just about everything — they’re cheap and plentiful.
However, what makes this tech more valuable is the ability to capture data and store it online — the essence of ‘cloud computing’. By combining data from thousands, even millions of sensors (or customers) and creating a central storage or ‘data centre’, you end up with a massively rich source of information that can potentially add major dollars to a business or provide new insight into a larger problem like climate change.
But to find the richness of that information within terabytes or exabytes of data, you can’t just pull out a calculator and do a few sums. That’s where data analytics or ‘data science’ comes in — it combines computer code or ‘algorithms’, mathematics and statistics to discover patterns within lots and lots of related data.
Combine these five pillars together — microcontrollers, wireless technology, sensors, cloud computing and data analytics — and you have the basic nuts-and-bolts of what this Internet of Things is all about.
THE INTERNET OF EVERYTHINGS?
But how to best harness the possibilities of IoT even from just a practical, functional viewpoint seems a bit ‘hit-and-miss’ so far. Plenty of companies are throwing around the ‘Internet of Things’ tag, some seemingly hell-bent on delivering wireless smarts to almost every object you know and love. Take a gadget, add a microcontroller, Wi-Fi and some input device, whether a switch or a touchscreen panel, and you can have a new ‘smart’ product — even better if you create a smartphone app to control it remotely. You’ll find everything from Google’s new Home voice-activated search assistant to wireless-enabled light bulbs and coffee machines, fridges and toasters. Some ideas pass the ‘pub test’, others maybe not. The good news is that there are plenty of innovative applications of IoT happening at the moment away from the hoopla of retail.
By combining data from thousands, even millions of sensors (or customers) and creating a central storage or ‘data centre’, you end up with a massively rich source of information that can potentially add major dollars to a business or provide new insight into a larger problem like climate change.