IoT

The Internet of Things, or IoT, is the collective term for the billions of physical objects that are currently connected to the Internet and that collectively gather and exchange data. Everything from the smallest medicines to the largest airplanes can now be a part of the Internet of Things thanks to the development of incredibly affordable computer processors and the availability of wireless networks. If it can be connected to the internet and transmitted commands or data, almost any physical thing can be made into an IoT device. The term IoT is basically used for things that are not expected to have an internet connection and which can interact independently with the network of human action.

History

Although there are undoubtedly some much earlier precedents, the idea of integrating sensors and intelligence into everyday objects was discussed throughout the 1980s and 1990s. However, aside from a few early projects, such as an internet-connected vending machine, progress was sluggish due to the fact that the technology wasn’t yet mature. There was no practical mechanism for objects to interact since chips were too huge and heavy. Before it was eventually feasible to connect billions of devices, we required processors that were affordable and power-efficient enough to be all but disposable. This problem was partially resolved by the use of RFID tags, which are low-power chips that can communicate wirelessly, as well as by the growing accessibility of broadband internet, cellular technology, and wireless networking. A critical step for the IoT to scale was the introduction of IPv6, which should, among other things, offer enough IP addresses for every device the globe (or, in fact, this galaxy) is ever likely to need. Kevin Ashton was the one presenting the phrase “Internet of Things” in 1999 but it took almost over a decade for the world to catch up with the vision of it.

 Iot and AI

The volume of knowledge IoT devices can gather is way larger than any human can cope with in an exceedingly useful way, and definitely not in real time. We’ve already seen that edge computing devices are needed just to form sense of the data coming in from the IoT endpoints. There’s also the necessity to detect and pander to data that may be just plain wrong.

Many IoT providers are offering machine learning and computing capabilities to form sense of the collected data. IBM’s Watson platform, as an example, is trained on IoT data sets to supply useful leads to the sector of predictive maintenance — analyzing data from drones to tell apart between trivial damage to a bridge and cracks that require attention, as an example.

Future of IoT

As the number of IoT devices still grow, companies will still improve safety features and appearance to faster connectivity options, like 5G and faster Wi-Fi, to enable more functionality for getting the info processed and analyzed. Additional collaboration between IT and operational technology (OT) is additionally expected.

IoT will still grow as smaller companies get in on the action, and bigger enterprises and industry giants like Google and Amazon still embrace IoT infrastructures. Perhaps IoT devices will become so omnipresent that a wireless network can essentially be treated as a large sensor. The technology continues to be exciting to observe.