Internet of things, a connected ecosystem
I don’t know what comes to mind when you hear the name The Jetsons or when you hear Tony Stark telling J.A.R.V.I.S to “check the weather and air traffic” to test his Mark II suit. I can guess you may be thinking now, how are these characters related, considering they are so far apart in their timelines?
I’m guessing many of you grew up watching The Jetsons, — well if you’re a centennial maybe I should explain it to you. —
The Jetsons was an animated series created in 1962 by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, where its characters lived in the year 2062, used all sorts of connected electronic devices to communicate (flat-screen TVs, robots, virtual assistants) and drew us the future in a positive, progressive and hyper-connected way.
Many, if not almost all, of the things they showed us in the animated series, EXIST today — this is something really amazing — except for flying cars and shopping malls on asteroids.
On the other hand we have Tony Stark and Iron Man — I’m talking about Iron Man in the movie — a superhero who represents the power of technology in support of human beings — this definition was made up by me. —
But what do these characters really have in common? Well, “things”. Yes, the “things” they used in their daily lives, the “things” they used to communicate, their virtual assistants, their intelligent homes and environments, their transportation systems and the robots.
For my concept, Rosie (Robotina in LATAM) has nothing to envy to a Mark II
And it is about those “things” and that surreal technology that we are going to talk about in this blog and how thanks to the maturation of technologies such as the Internet of Things that world of The Supersonics and Iron Man is now a reality for all of us.
IoT concept
When we talk about the Internet of Things or IoT, we are referring to the interconnection of everyday objects with the internet and how these objects transmit and exchange data in real time — whaaaat? —
In a definition from oracle.com we find the following: “The Internet of Things (IoT) describes the network of physical objects (things) that carry embedded sensors, software and other technologies in order to connect and exchange data with other devices and systems over the Internet.”
What did you think, that we were going to talk about cartoons, well no! I’m just using them as a reference to give you an idea.
Where did the term Internet of Things come from?
It was Kevin Ashton who in 1999, when he was working for Procter & Gamble (P&G), trying to solve a logistics and inventory problem of the company’s products in the stores, presented a project to the company’s managers to place sensors connected to the network in all P&G products in order to know their stock in the stores and solve their timely supply.
His presentation opened with a title that read “Internet of Things.” His idea was good enough that MIT started to do research on it — obviously with his participation — and he was able to get the idea off the ground.
We can understand IoT as an evolution of M2M (machine-to-machine communication), where machine-to-machine communication and data analysis occurred in enterprise and closed environments.
Until 2009 the term “Internet of Things” was not heard much, it was thanks to the internet itself and the use of social networks such as twitter that in that year the term and especially its acronym IoT started to become popular. — Well it also helped that that year the number of things that were connected to the internet surpassed the human population — the number of things that were connected to the internet surpassed the human population.
Why is IoT important?
The expansion of the internet has given us unimagined and almost supernatural powers — tell me if you don’t feel like Tony Stark when you talk to your cell phone to ask it for the time and to inform you of your meetings of the day —
The Internet is no longer just computers and servers, it is now a network of things that know us, a network that knows our tastes and routines.
Today the term “Internet of Things” (IoT) is used to refer to a world in which everything (houses, cars, clothes, watches, bracelets, mirrors, cameras, coffee makers, toasters, EVERYTHING), is connected to the internet, with the objective, as mentioned above, to obtain data and information in real time, process it and make decisions based on the results of those analyses .
You might be thinking that this is very complex, well let’s see an example
Imagine you are driving to a work appointment and you need to find a parking space nearby, but the place you know is full. Without the Internet of Things helping you, you would have to go through all the nearby streets looking for an available parking lot, which could cause you to waste time and gas, and possibly be late for the appointment. With the internet of things this situation is solved immediately, you can simply consult an application on your phone that receives real-time data and information from sensors located in nearby parking lots and shows you which ones are available.
Now imagine also that you get out of bed on a normal day, like any other, but when you get up a device informs you of your agenda for the day, your medical appointments, your meetings, while it communicates with the coffee maker in the kitchen to prepare the coffee as you like and at the same time checks the data from the refrigerator (also connected to the internet) to know what products you should buy back home and tell you where you can buy them.
In the 90’s while you saw that the Supersonics had all that in their house you could imagine how it would be in “the future” an automated house like that, now thanks to the Internet of Things all this is possible at very low costs, now it is our present.
According to estimates of companies specialized in IoT, by 2021 there will be between 50,000 and 75,000 million devices or “things” connected to the network worldwide (which is possible thanks to protocols such as IPv6). Thus contributing to improving people’s quality of life.
Where do we find IoT?
IoT has applications in different fields, but we can divide it into three main branches of use:
- Consumer
- Enterprise
- Infrastructure
If we go a little deeper into these categories we find that the IoT has broad applications in the domestic sector, health, medical, education, transportation, retail, industrial, logistics, agriculture, environment, and the list can be as long as environments in which human beings exist.
Smart cities like the ones shown in The Jetsons are now a reality, traffic measurement, city management logistics, the use of intelligent traffic lights, among others, are now part of our daily lives.
IoT is growing rapidly
Many of us, or at least me, are amazed at how the IoT is growing day by day and is becoming more and more present in our lives. The first time I heard the term was about 11 years ago, I was a student of industrial design and I was in a product design class when a professor talked about it. A few months later a friend of mine began to develop, as a degree project, a bracelet that informed its users (aimed at people with eating disorders) through sensory stimuli (based on research on differentiating sensory experiences and olfactory marketing) that it was time to eat. A project that for many teachers was crazy and that was not developed in the rigor of design research. Dah!— hey Natalia, look, you were right, we always knew that your project was amazing, that the wrong ones were the teachers -.
Today, in my daily life there are many IoT devices, from the google home voice assistant that is connected to my email account and calendar, through the coffee maker and the TV to the so-called “wearable” devices such as the watch or the bracelet to measure my heart rate while I exercise — of course this is now done by the watch — But this is not about whether I use IoT devices or not, but about the acceleration that this industry has had to be present in all sectors of our lives.
Despite the great advantages of this whole world of technology and the internet of things, there are many risks that often call into question these advantages.
Data is very valuable
All these objects we have been talking about are nothing more than electronic devices that, by means of sensors, collect and transmit our data, even the most private ones. Where we are, what we eat, what our tastes are, where we go, who we call, are data that can easily be collected by IoT devices. At this point security becomes a very important issue.
Have you ever wondered what happens to that collected data, what you are accepting when you give your watch and your phone permissions to know your location at all times or to know how many kilometers you travel, how much you weigh and how many steps you take during the day? Where is that data stored? How is that data used? — It doesn’t seem a little strange to you that if you have a watch synchronized to your phone for sports, you get advertisements in every possible way about the latest running shoes of a certain brand — but you don’t know how to use this data.
According to Matthias Wahlisch*, professor of computer science at the Free University of Berlin, the biggest challenges of the Internet of Things are data security and privacy. Another major risk of the IoT is cyber attacks, as every sensor, refrigerator or toaster (to give a few examples) connected to the internet can be a gateway to the network for a hacker, which on a large scale can be devastating for a city, a company or a complex IoT-based logistics infrastructure.
According to Kevin Ashton himself in an interview for the Colombian newspaper El Espectador, digital security at the moment is very good, but often very poorly implemented: “Most breaches are a result of someone not implementing existing digital security technology, or not properly…I assume that governments and businesses will learn to take digital security seriously, implement it and update it so that there are no vulnerabilities. It’s like being robbed for leaving the door open.”
Martin Schallbruch* (German government security advisor), agrees with Kevin Ashton and states that people who use the internet of things, must take responsibility for installing security patches on all the devices they use, take inventory of them, check the status of the software versions of each device, update passwords periodically and establish certain security protocols. A task that seems complicated but is very important.
What is the future of IoT?
Thanks to the arrival of 5G, it is expected that the IoT will have a powerful boost, since one of the great advantages that 5G technology offers to the IoT is that sensors can connect to the Internet much more economically, with low power consumption and with exaggeratedly short response times. This will allow sectors such as autonomous cars and medicine, to give an example, to grow exponentially in the development of network-connected devices.
A major challenge for the IoT and the large technology companies that are part of this market, in the face of growing demand, is to generate the necessary communication protocols to make these types of devices secure. Let us hope that the efforts of companies are in favor of safeguarding the data and security of users, companies and cities that every day make use of IoT devices.
If you liked this post, don’t forget to share it with your friends and I hope it helps you learn more about IoT.
See you in the next one!
Sources:
- Oracle, Internet of Things, website article, <https://www.oracle.com/mx/internet-of-things/what-is-iot/>
- IBM, What is IoT, webpage article, <https://www.ibm.com/blogs/internet-of-things/what-is-the-iot/>
- Wikipedia, Internet of things <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_of_things>
- Qué es el internet de las cosas, DW Español Youtube Video, Oct 11, 2019 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWrY571yHYI>
