Internet of Things(IoT) is a supergiant network with connected devices. With IoT, you can imagine everything in your daily-life activities to be interconnected. The vacuum cleaners, the garden sprinklers, the microwave ovens, the treadmill everything connected to the internet, hence the name Internet of Things.
There is no limit as to what actually will be the ‘Things’ in IoT will be. It could well be a human or an electronic device or even your pet with a biochip transponder.
The term IoT is said to be coined by Kevin Aston, co-founder of the Auto-ID centre. During his presentation to Procter and Gamble (P&G), in 1999, Aston mentioned IoT in pursuit of bringing RFID(Radio Frequency ID) to P&G’s attention.
What impact will it have? What will it do?
What IoT will be doing is analysing the unstructured data generated by machines like microwave, toasters etc to be used smartly and more efficiently.
Q: What was the home appliance that made use of the internet for the first time?
A: The first was a coke machine back in the 1980s. This device was used with the web to check the availability of cold drinks.
IoT is a newer version of M2M (Machine to Machine) communication. M2M is already in use with all the interconnected laptops, computers, mobile devices and cloud computing.
IoT will be connecting arguably all devices to the internet. Yes, all of them.
Someone in the late 90s or early 2000 never had thought what features would modern technology be offering 20 years after.
A simple example here, do you think adults in 90s would have thought they will be able to remotely work on a digital file collaboratively like the way we do today in google docs for instance?
This is an advancement, this is how technology is evolving and IoT is just a technological advancement which will benefit mankind in a whole new way.
How does the ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) work?
So when devices are interconnected, IoT will provide a platform to these devices to which they will send information that all of them can understand and respond. This gathered information in the platform will then be analyzed and to trigger a certain action as a response.
Let’s take an example of a garden sprinkler. An IoT enabled sprinkler will be able to
- Switch itself off once all the plant gets watered.
- Determine how frequently should a plant be watered.
- Help analyse which plants need how much water
- Help determine the SWI (Soil Wetness Index) and SMI (Soil Moisture Index)
The sprinkler will continuously be sending information to IoT about the amount of time it was on and the frequency of its use. It can also have a sensor to read the structure and pattern of a certain plant.
However, there is a debate going on about IoT that every device that can be connected to the internet does not necessarily mean it should be connected. But, the data sent to IoT will one way or the other be useful to a user. Sharing this data will have no negative impacts on anything and rather help in cutting down waste.
