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http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/print/9221614/Today_... 16-Nov-11
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stream of life."
The deluge has already begun.
"There are several industries where IoT
is happening, and some where it is a
pipe dream," says Steve Hilton at
Analysis Mason, a technology
consulting firm in London. It is
happening in energy and utilities,
automobiles and transportation, and
security and surveillance. There's a
"tiny bit in healthcare," he adds. If you
include e-readers like Kindle, it is
happening in the consumer field.
Where it is not happening today, he
says, is in household white goods, such
as kitchen appliances. "The vendors
want them, but I don't think there'll be
much of a market," Hilton says. "If it
costs an extra $150, would you buy it?
In this case technology is ahead of
market demand."
New York University photography professor Wafaa Bilal displays the digital camera mount he had implanted in the
back of his head in December 2010. The concept of the project was to capture images objectively, without the
interference of a viewfinder, according to Bilal. Images from his camera have been streamed over the Internet, but
Bilal's body has had problems accepting the implant. REUTERS/Jessica Rinaldi
Katharine Frase, vice president at IBM Research, wonders what business models could be
developed if the washing machine, the thermostat and the water heater could be managed
together, by either the consumer or a third party. "We see a willingness by people to share
information about themselves if they are going to get something back. If there is some
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benefit, like lowering the power bill, from you knowing that I am taking a shower, then it might
be OK."
"The investments are being made now," adds Kevin Dallas, Microsoft's manager of Windows
Embedded products, though he declined to give specific examples. "We are seeing it across
every industry, and we will start to see the results in the next two to three years."
Dallas foresees several possible near-future scenarios based on the IoT:
z As a member of a loyalty program, you send your shopping list to a store. You are given an RFID tag
on arrival, and networked digital display signs in the store direct you through the aisles, from item to
item, to find what you need.
z In other stores, signs size you up as you approach them on the basis of your height and clothing and
then display promotions that are assumed to be appropriate to you.
z In any store, digital signage offers promotions based on real-time events, such as sales volumes or
the weather.
z Your refrigerator monitors its contents and makes restocking suggestions. (Refrigerators with
connectivity are already on the market, including one from Samsung, but Hilton's sense is that there
is currently no market demand.)
z Your car tracks where it has gone and where it is going, predicts where it will go next and has
suggestions ready if you ask for the nearest gas station, using data from the cloud. (Toyota and
Microsoft are already building such a service.)
z Your car additionally monitors its internal functions and offers maintenance advice, as the OnStar
remote diagnostics facility already does for General Motors and, now, other makers' cars.
z Your car's black-box data can be submitted to your insurance company in an effort to get reduced
rates, assuming that data constitutes evidence of safe driving. A number of car insurance firms are
already offering usage-based policies, sometimes based on data gathered by an instrument mounted
on the car, as with the Snapshot program from Progressive Casualty Insurance Company.
z Your car can send you a notice if your teenager drives it over a certain speed, or through a specified
"geo-fence," as can now be done with certain add-on devices.
Other sources predict hospital beds with so much instrumentation that no sensors need to be
attached to the patient, as shown in this research.
"After three or four years it will go beyond retail, and after 10 years our whole lives will be
different from what we can imagine now," predicts Kneko Burney, strategist at Compass
Intelligence, a consulting firm in Scottsdale, Ariz. "In 10 years it will not be strange to have a
cell phone earpiece embedded in your ear."
In China, Premier Wen Jiabao has
made the Internet of Things a
national goal, notes MIT Prof.
Edmund W. Schuster, who works
in the university's Auto ID Center.
"The Chinese see it as
fundamental part of a harmonious
society, especially as it would
make services easier to coordinate
in dense cities," he says.
Additionally, the municipal
government of Wuxi (also
rendered Wu-Shi), a suburb of
Shanghai, has announced
intentions to build an IoT-based
theme park. "It is expected to
become a travel destination of [a]
new generation for [sic] Internet
By the numbers
Steve Hilton at Analysis Mason, a technology consulting firm in
London, forecasts a grand scale for the Internet of Things.
Here's what he's expecting.
In the energy industry, Hilton figures there should be 22 million
connected residential utility meters by the end of 2011, and the
figure should grow by 50% yearly for the next 10 years. The
meters, part of the "smart grid" trend, report power
consumption in near real time through wireless, landline or
data-over-powerline connections, allowing better management
of the power grid, he explains.
In transportation, there should be 30.8 million device
connections worldwide, mostly used to track the location of
trucks, and growth should be 27% yearly. In security and
surveillance, there should be 20.6 million connected devices,
counting both residential and industrial installations, with a
growth rate of 37%.
In healthcare there should be 1.5 million devices at the end of
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M2M roots
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the year, with a growth rate of 20% to 25%. The devices are
usually worn by a patient to monitor a chronic condition, such
as a device that advises a heart disease patient when to take
medicine. Healthcare is under-represented because of the
amount of testing that a medical device must undergo before it
can be marketed, Hilton notes.
As for transportation, a full range of tracking and maintenance
monitoring instruments should soon be available in the
consumer car market, he suggests. "All the major car-makers
are on top of this and deciding on solutions," he says.
The change to the IoT started in 2001, "when we started to see IP (Internet Protocol) offered
through cellular networks," he recalls.
"Internet of Things is a slightly newer phrase that means the same thing as M2M," agrees Bill
Ingle, an analyst at Beecham Research in Boston. "The carriers have gotten interested in
M2M in the last two years as another source of revenue, as the voice market has started to
saturate."
Lucero at ABI Research adds that that there is considerable overlap among the Internet of
Things, M2M, RFID, smart meters, various sensor networks, building and industrial control
systems, and home automation.
The technology
As for the necessary sensor, transmission and processing technologies, "There are no showstoppers," says Evans. However, it would be advisable to perfect ways for the sensors to
"harvest" energy from their environments to avoid reliance on batteries, he adds. The other
big enabler will be the spread of IPv6, as that addressing scheme offers enough potential
Internet addresses to give every atom on the face of the earth its own address, Evans notes.
"There are no technical barriers," agrees Burney. The limiting factor is the cost of the micro
components, the bandwidth of the wireless networks, business strategies and the ability of
humans to absorb that much information, he adds.
HP Labs is currently developing nanotechnology sensors for IoT use, says Stan Williams,
senior HP Fellow and director of the Nanotechnology Research Group at HP Labs. So far his
lab has developed a MEMS-based device for detecting vibration and movement, which can
sense vibration on three axes and rotation on three axes. HP Labs is also working on taste
and smell sensors based on laser scattering. They are sensitive to one part per trillion, and
can be used to identify chemicals and biological species, Williams says.
Both are about one square millimeter, meaning that they would be very inexpensive to mass
produce, he adds. Other types of sensors needed to complete the IoT, such as for pressure
and light, are already available on the open market, he adds.
In the next year HP Labs will be mounting its first big project using IoT technology, a seismic
imaging project for Shell Oil, giving transparency to the top 20 kilometers of the Earth's crust
over an area of ten square kilometers. "We'll be doing the same for the Earth as has already
been done with imaging inside human beings," Williams says.
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The Samsung RSG309 LCD Refrigerator ($2,700) sports a built-in 8-inch LCD touchscreen on the left-hand door that
supports Pandora, WeatherBug, Twitter, Google Calendar, a slideshow viewer for Picasa images and several more
apps -- with more in the works.
But once IoT use is widespread, the volume of data that will be generated will be thousands
of times what we have today, so the processing technology "needs to be thousands of times
more capable," adds Williams. "Is that possible? Yes."
The processors may be capable, "but at what point do we run out of bandwidth?" IBM's Frase
asks. To avoid that, the information must be filtered in some way. IBM is working on stream
processing (to discern signal from noise using rudimentary analytics), and is doing other work
at the device level to make the current bandwidth more effective. The goal, Frase says, is to
"make it more affordable to deploy devices."
Meanwhile, the devices being attached to IoT will need new user interfaces, which must be
intuitive and not require new behavior from the users, notes Burney. The basic technology,
the interfaces and even the procedures for initializing new devices will involve new
specializations that will require extensive industry partnerships, she predicts.
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http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/print/9221614/Today_... 16-Nov-11