Day 54 – Q 2. What is Internet of Things (IoT)? What are its current and potential applications?

2. What is Internet of Things (IoT)? What are its current and potential applications? 

इंटरनेट ऑफ थिंग्स (IoT) क्या है? इसके वर्तमान और संभावित अनुप्रयोग क्या हैं?

Introduction:

The internet of things, or IoT, is a system of interrelated computing devices, mechanical and digital machines, objects, animals or people that are provided with unique identifiers (UIDs) and the ability to transfer data over a network without requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction.

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Kevin Ashton, co-founder of the Auto-ID Center at MIT, first mentioned the internet of things in a presentation he made to Procter & Gamble (P&G) in 1999. IoT has evolved from the convergence of wireless technologies, microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), microservices and the internet. 

Current applications:

• Healthcare: IoT has various applications in healthcare, which are from remote monitoring equipment to advance and smart sensors to equipment integration. Telemedicine is already being used and recently a remote-controlled heart surgery was done by a Gujarat doctor.
• Industrial automation: inter-connecting the different machines and devices in industries such as power generation, oil, gas etc., to smart handling of resources.
• Wearables: monitoring the physical activities like the health bands and also the smart watches with almost every possible functions of a mobile phone.
• Smart Grid: extract information on the behaviors of consumers and electricity suppliers in an automated fashion to improve the efficiency, economics, and reliability of electricity distribution.
• Smart home: connecting the different components like lights, electric devices to remotely control. Also, increasingly IOT is used in e-homes optimizing the power use.
• Car: Connected car technology with an extensive network of multiple sensors, antennas, embedded software, and technologies help making decisions with consistency, accuracy, and speed.
• Smart retail: across a number of applications that improve store operations, increasing purchases, reducing theft, enabling inventory management, and enhancing the consumer’s shopping experience. 
• Smart Supply Chain: like tracking of goods, helping suppliers exchange inventory information, communicate data about different parameters, such as pressure, temperature, and utilization of the machine, process workflow and change equipment settings to optimize performance.

Potential applications:

• Smart farming: often overlooked today has huge potential which includes smart monitoring of farm inputs, livestock maintenance and so on. Smart Greenhouse is a potential field which enhances the yield of crops by controlling environmental parameters.
• Healthcare: integrated with advanced nanotechnology have potential applications in Nano based drug delivery system, smart pills etc., Also, smart monitoring of patients acting as a bridge between collection and secured sharing, analysis, response of health data.
• Automobile: driverless car is a combination of IOT with AI and is a potential future application. Also, Tier Air Pressure Detection, smart display of information about different components are some potential applications.
• Smart Eye: Google’s most ambitious project – The Glass. equipped with sensors and connectivity options from Wi-Fi to Bluetooth to provide numerous options and accessibility features right in front of our eye.
• Lighting control: the potential application includes lighting control with mesh networking to develop large scale, reliable, wireless lighting solutions to homes. The sensors embedded can also detect the presence of people and turn off the lights in their absence. 
• Wearables innovation with potential applications like monitoring water level in body and reminder to drink water, monitor heart rate and automatically inform the emergency contact/hospital in case of accidents and so on. Also, Pulse Oximeter is a potential application which monitors the oxygen levels. 
• Smart city: Though, at present IOT has been in use for smart cities, it has immense potential for future applications. The various components of city administration are connected and spans a wide variety of use cases, from water distribution and traffic management to waste management and environmental monitoring.

Conclusion

Internet of things is a field with literally unlimited possibilities in every field. Combined with Artificial Intelligence, IT changes the way of interaction with the real and physical world and has immense potential for most advanced applications with high performance and optimal resource use.