The Internet of Things and its benefits

If we had to look up the definition of The Internet of Things (IoT), we would learn that it is about connecting internetenabled devices that relay information back to us, to cloudbased applications and from device to device.

These 'smart devices’ can be anything from mobile phones, fridges, washing machines to wearables, medical equipment or jet engines. In a few words, in the Internet of Things, objects use the web and unique identifiers such as RFID tags or processors in order to exist as part of the internet.

For the past few years, we’ve been told that it is going to be an imminent and epic change – all predictions suggested tens of billions of connected devices and trillions of dollars of economic value created. Nonetheless, the dominant feeling expressed by end users was that of scepticism. Having said this, right now the IoT feels like an avalanche of new connected products, many of which seem to solve trivial problems; expensive gadgets that resolutely fall in the “nice to have” category, rather than “must have”.

This Internet of Things has potential applications across virtually every sector - such as transportation, infrastructure, environmental monitoring, health care and more. Within the transportation sector, we would safely get wherever we might need to go. Cars would intuitively take the fastest route, avoid construction, handle tolls, park on their own and communicate with other vehicles on the road. In the infrastructure sector, we would be able to use smart devices to monitor the integrity and other critical factors of road, rail lines, power and pipelines, bridges, runways and more - to detect problems and initiate a response both rapidly and costeffectively. With environmental monitoring, weather sensors would make money collecting and selling air, water, and tremor data, giving people advance warnings of natural disasters, rising levels of pollutants, and monitoring lightning strikes and forest fires. Moreover, the health care sector could link devices that manage medical records, inventory, equipment and pharmaceuticals to monitor and manage disease and improve quality control.

For the end users, progress may seem slow, but the IoT start-up ecosystem is booming. This is a broad market – in some ways a collection of distinct markets that have a lot in common, but also follow different dynamics to some extent. From the beginning of 2016, we are perhaps three or four years into an explosion of start-up activity in IoT, particularly on the consumer side. Incubators like Y Combinator and Techstars, crank out legions of start-ups and crowdfunding websites help to provide the early financing needed.

The rapid advancement and ubiquitous penetration of mobile network, web based information creation and sharing, and software defined networking technology have been enabling sensing, predicting and controlling of the physical world with information technology.

Every business process can be empowered, and therefore, various industries are redesigning their business models and processes along Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm. In order to maximise the social and economic benefit of this technology, issues of interoperability, mashing up data, development of open platforms and standardisation across technology layers have to be addressed.

In short, we are starting to have an internet not just of computers, but of things. Anything – even a human body, if equipped with the right electronic parts – can become part of IoT, so long as it can collect and transmit data through the internet.

As we have seen, the Internet of Things (IoT) is in fact already with us, but it has not yet reached a point where everyone feels its impact. However, this is about to change. Soon, every industry, and virtually every company, will not only be affected, but transformed by IoT. In combination with other developments, such as cloud computing, smart grids, nanotechnology and robotics, IoT will usher in a period of greater economic efficiency, productivity, safety, and profits. In turn, its impact on the global economy will be substantial.

The Internet of Things promises enormous benefits to consumers and businesses over the coming years. Having said this, to enjoy them to the full, we will need to find effective ways to deal with the risks that will invariably be riding along on the IoT bandwagon.