The house whose contents ‘talk’ to each other
With the Internet of Things, all aspects of our lives will be connected and communicating
JOSEPH HALL FEATURE WRITER Hello, pot, meet kettle.
And while you’re at it, say hello to fridge, stove and clock as well.
Imagine a morning when your wakeup alarm wirelessly signals your kettle to start boiling and your stove to heat up a pot of water — water for the eggs your refrigerator told your smartphone you needed to buy yesterday.
This year brought you far closer to making that Jetsons morning a reality, experts say.
Things talking to things. The “Internet of Things.”
“This topic is an incredibly broad idea, it touches many, many things at many different levels,” says Jonathan Rose, a University of Toronto computer engineer.
While it’s been discussed for some time, notes Rose, “I feel that in the last year . . . something has changed.”
The imminence of the Internet of Things — IoT for short — is due to recent “Moore’s law” advances in the underlying technologies that will run it, he says. Moore’s law was proposed in the mid-1960s by Intel Corp. co-founder Gordon Moore, and it predicts that the computational power of chip transistors will double every two years or so.
And in 2014, he says, Moore’s law produced a confluence of computational advances that will launch IoT into reality and drastically cut consumer costs.
“Things just got so cheap that you could stick computers and wireless communication darn near everywhere.
“When there are these chips that can very cheaply do a little bit of processing and also talk to your phone wirelessly, to me that’s what the latest bit of the (IoT) revolution is.”
Rose’s U of T desk is currently cluttered with recently purchased and “dirt cheap” electronic widgets that can be seen as the vanguard of that coming revolution.
Among these is a tracker button that can locate lost wallets.
“You stick it in your wallet and if your wallet ever gets separated from your phone, your phone will alarm and tell you that your wallet is gone, or your purse, or you grandmother for that matter,” he says.
“It also remembers the last place it saw that thing, so on your phone it can pull up a map and say, ‘Yeah, I was last next to that thing at this location.’ ”
Also, anyone running the tracking program and passing the lost item will trip an alert to the device builder’s headquarters, which can alert police or owners to its location.
“It’s just a really clever thing all enabled by this very simple, small, cheap wireless technology,” Rose says.
“And that’s just become so cheap that there are a zillion ideas like that coming out — all these cool ideas.”
The coming connectivity of things, however, will not be limited to electronics that plug into a wall socket.
“It will be things that plug into you, or go inside you even, is how I think about it,” Rose says.
“There’d be sensors all over the place and they connect and they could be inside you, or wrap around you.”
These bodily sensors could monitor known medical or psychological conditions or measure general health indicators and relay them to a computer or smartphone — either yours or your physician’s.
Indeed, the new smart watches included in Rose’s clutter of electronic gizmos already record heart rates.
“And I think when we get more sophisticated, when we get doctors really thinking about what to measure, how to mea- sure and what to do about it, we’ll help in the medical world (significantly),” he says.
Transportation will also benefit immensely from IoT technologies, says Alberto Leon-Garcia, a U of T computer engineer who specializes in the creation of large communications systems.
Leon-Garcia, who predicts the IoT will be an integral part of our lives within a decade, says it will be especially beneficial in smoothing out urban transit and traffic.
He is already building a network covering Toronto’s central core that can monitor traffic and transit along key corridors in real time.
This network may eventually be used to create algorithms to adjust transportation signals, transit routes or road access, all aided by emerging IoT technologies.
Such technologies will also be key to the anticipated age of self-driving cars, LeonGarcia says. The IoT could also become a critical, carbon-fighting tool in the climate change battle, he adds.
By easing traffic congestion, fixing light and temperature timings in the office and home and in many other ways, the new technologies have the potential to cut carbon emissions considerably.
For example, a British pilot project is now using sensors placed around the city of Cambridge that monitor automobile emissions, Leon-Garcia says.
“You can then tie this information to your transportation system, your traffic control system.
“You can control the lights signals to expedite the mobility. You can configure the overall network, the roads system to optimize (them) so that your system is working to minimize emissions.”
Much of the IoT will be run and accessed by smartphones for the foreseeable future, Rose says.
“We’ll have that hub, the phone, on us and it will talk to the things around us that are really tiny.
“I think that’s going to stay. It’s possible the phone will disappear and we’ll just talk to the walls, but I think we’re going to have some communication device on us.”
Leon-Garcia says data on things like temperature, location and time already produced by smartphones can be used to train personal IoT-run devices to work in accordance with your average days.
“For example at home it might have to do with the temperature or when the lights go on, things of that sort.
“You can also have a personal assistant of sorts prioritizing you alerting you reminding you what you need to do,"
But IoT advances also hold Big Brother perils for which many hve rightfully raised alarms, Rose says.
“The fear is well placed; anything... can be used for good or evil.
“And there are lots of potentials for evil here, and that’s why privacy and proctiontion will be essential.”
The greatest risks the IoT poses to privacy come from the data that it can collect and aggregate on each of us, Rose says.
“Who gets to look at it, and can you stop someone from looking at it ... people should be worried about that.
“You can’t look at these (devices) and tel if they’re safe. It’s all hidden away in this microscopic circuitry and software that you cannot see. There’s a huge issue with that without question.”
The potential for hacking into personal lives will also increase exponentially with ubiquitous IoT technologies, Rose says.
“That’s ever more scary (especially when) we’ve got these (medical) things inside us.
“You’d hate to have that hacked, and so
the engineering of it better be really good to make sure it can’t be.
“It’s going to be difficult do guarantee that. It’s going to be darn near impossible to guarantee it.”
Advances in artificial intelligence (A.I.) and its potential to reach into all our personal and public systems through the IoT can also present Terminator-like possibilities — a takeover by the machines.
“That A.I. is going be able to help you and keep you safe and healthy and be your friend and partner possibly,” Rose says.
“But if it’s controlled by something that is not working in your interest, then there’s a problem. There’s no question.”
Leon-Garcia also sees piracy of personal information gathered by IoT devices as a potential problem.
“There are concerns, serious concerns associated with privacy and security.”
Laws and computing safeguards protecting ownership of personal information must accompany any IoT emergence, Leon-Garcia says.
Finally, he says, since it’s unlikely to have access to ad revenues that make most Internet searches free, the Internet of Things will likely be a pay-as-you-go proposition.