Consider the following example.
You are going to hospital for a hip operation. The chances are, very soon, your surgeon will be wearing a pair of
You leave the hospital, and are given a recovery plan together with another wearable device, much like a JawboneUP wristband. The sensors in your hip are now connected to the wristband which also monitors your movements, and that data is transmitted to your patient records for your local GP who can observe how your recovery is going in line with the recovery plan. Your wristband also ‘reminds’ you when it’s time to take your meds, and via RFID/ Near Field Comms will warn you if you’re about to reach for the wrong bottle.
All that data is constantly fed to the GP who can alter your recovery plan in line with your progress, or even combine it with other patients who have been through a similar procedure and adjust automatically, in real-time, according to trends which may benefit you even more.
Your medical insurance and future premiums will also be adjusted according to how your recovery is going, whether you stick or deviate to your planned convalescence.
Now we get into deeper connected territory.
Your utilities company could be made aware of your situation, and via your patient wristband and interface to your smart home, adjust your electricity and gas plan in line with your limited mobility. No point having a smart home and a dumb utilities provider. Smart thermostats, smart lights, smart household appliances all can switch on and off and learn your patterns as you recover. Your wristband could switch off the TV for example if you take a snooze on the couch by monitoring your inactivity.
As you recover, you become more mobile. Your connected car transmits its location as you drive, anything ‘smart’ that is geofenced becomes activated as you draw near, again switching on the heating at the right temperature in advance before you reach home. In fact, your car may not even allow you to drive at all because the associated triggers in your recovery haven't been set to allow you to, so it drives you instead.
Your house and smart possessions will be collectively more intelligent than you by 2020, but the experience will become hyper-personalized.
In the above lifestyle example, consider the industries that were actually connected by it all:
- Medical
- Pharma
- Insurance
- Consumer Wearables and Homeware
- Utilities
- Automotive
The data itself is the key to unlocking a number of benefits, and how we act on that data.
Which leads to the three core elements to achieving success in the Internet Of Things.
The Value Is In The Data, Not The Thing
IDC claims that we only analyze 0.5% of the data being generated globally right now. The typical human obsession over the size and scale of the Internet of Things (Gartner says 26 billion connected devices by 2020, Cisco says 50 billion, Morgan Stanley says 75 billion) has become the illogical focus by analysts, attention shouldn’t be on the Things or the Internet, but on the Data that’s going to be generated.
In fact, data is going to change a lot more than just the internet. Data will affect business models as technology platform providers struggle to sell their solutions based on value propositions decades old. Larry Ellison just announced that "the Oracle Cloud is complete." Cloud is already looking outdated now. Selling on the value, transport and analytics of the data rather than the infrastructure to hold it is king.
But unlocking that value and the relevance may be the tricky part. You may not be aware of the relevance of the data you possess in because finding the information to put it all in context isn’t clear or immediately apparent, so how can you look for it ?
And how does someone else who may need it for their own decision making ?
And so the Relevance Paradox exists:
“This occurs when an individual or a group of professionals are unaware of certain essential information which would guide them to make better decisions, and help them avoid inevitable and undesirable consequences. These professionals will seek only the information and advice they believe is the bare minimum amount required as opposed to what they actually need to fully meet their own or the organization’s goals.”
As the full potential of the Internet of Things grows so does the need to unlock the relevance of the data being generated. It was never about the size of the information (again, that human desire to compare stats...)
This is where the next two elements of IoT are critical in realizing value.
Distributed/ Edge Computing Are Key For In-Situ Analytics
Who remembers SETI@home, the project run by SETI to harness internet connected PC’s across the globe to help analyse signals from space ? 3 million users assigned their PCs and PlayStations to solve computational data from radio telescopes, it was an early and successful attempt at mass distributed (or grid) computing using software to utilise latent CPU cycles on client machines when the screensaver was engaged.
Jump forward to 2015 and there are reportedly more mobile devices on the planet than there are human beings. 7bn devices, with more computational power than the rocket that took man to the moon this very day in 1969. Even the wearables market is growing exponentially, in just a few years, there could be more people using wearable tech devices than there are in the US and Canada. For the IoT landscape, and in order for it to realize its full potential, the value of the data must be unlocked in real-time and in-situ, not captured first in huge Hadoop vats and churned by platforms. The only way to do this is to through Edge and Distributed Computing.
Edge Computing is pushing the frontier of computing applications, data, and services away from centralized nodes to the logical extremes of a network. It enables analytics and knowledge generation to occur at the source of the data. This approach requires leveraging resources that may not be continuously connected to a network such as laptops, smartphones, tablets and sensors.
Put simply; every sensor, every device with a CPU connected to the Internet could become part of a distributed analytical engine. Which puts proprietary platform vendors in a tricky situation.
Open Data And Blockchain Unlock The Value, Individuals Are In Control
As I mentioned in a previous article about Data Privacy, I believe that the Open Data movement combined with the security of Blockchain may be vital to the longer term success and vision for the Internet of Things.
“Open data is the idea that certain data should be freely available to everyone to use and republish as they wish, without restrictions from copyright, patents, or other mechanisms of control.”
For example, OpenSensors.io is a startup dedicated to IoT and the value of open data. You decide whether to publish your data for all to access with an open data license or keep it for your private use. You can share communal data with the world or privately to build your own services, and services built in this way become agnostic to the device.
Open Data threatens those with proprietary platforms yet again, and rightly so in a way. Remember DNLA ?
The Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) was founded in 2003 by a collection of global companies with a vision to easily connect and enjoy photos, music and video among networked consumer electronics, PC and mobile devices.
In order to achieve the vision of a digitally connected home, DLNA published industry design guidelines that allows OEMs to be involved in a networked device market, leading to “more innovation, simplicity and value for consumers.” According to the Alliance, this ultimately meant that industry collaboration and standards-based interoperability produced compelling products. And it worked.
What we have at the moment is a collection of consortiums all trying to be the defining standard for IoT; AllSeen (Alljoyn), Open Interconnect Consortium, Thread Group,
Interoperability needs Open Data, not closed systems. APIs are only part of the solution.
And where does Blockchain fit in this open equation ? For one, Blockchain is a decentralised and distributed digital record, it can only be updated by consensus of a majority of the participants in the system. Right now everything is centralized, and therefore can be manipulated and hacked. Not so with Blockchain. And users remain anonymous, privacy is maintained.
We can think even bigger — let’s put health records, voting, ownership documents, marriage licenses and lawsuits in the blockchain. Eventually, every dataset and every digital transaction could leave a “fingerprint” there, creating an audit trail for any digital event throughout history, without compromising anyone’s personal privacy. – Mike Gault
Open Data and Blockchain will be combined to create a means for data to be transmitted, accessed and analysed securely for the Internet of Things to be successful.
So there we have it. 3 absolutely core fundamentals for the Internet Of Things to succeed.
Without these in place, and without the push to make data the lynchpin in any IOT strategy, we'll always be obsessing over the size of our things.
