The Internet of Smart and Morphable Things:

• What if my water bottle could talk to me ?
• What if my baby’s feeding bottle could sing her favourite lullaby when she cried - and learned from it ?
• What if my Smart Scooper could throw a fit if i am eat too much sugar ?

At www.rudralabs.com we see the future of the Consumer IOT monetisation being driven by "Behaviour-Patches" that can be downloaded onto the Consumer IOT Device (Thing) as an Over-the-Air (OTA) hardware update.

Lets take a simple example of a Behaviour-Patch that makes its inventors a lot of money. As a guitar player, I use an Amplifier App Amplitube which is free in its basic version. App monetisation is very simple - sell me more customised and personalised sounds. If I buy the "Slash patch", I pay extra via an In-App purchase and get the Amplifier to enable Amplitube settings to give me the Slash sound.

My Amplifier now behaves differently.

Can a Consumer IOT Thing be made to change, simply and with one Click ?

Could I get my "Thing" to behave differently based on some explicit action that I take, such as an In-App purchase ?

Yes. We can control the behaviour of the Thing by a one-click action within the App that controls the Thing.

What are the kinds of ways in which a Thing can behave ?

Typically a Thing can blink in various patterns and colours, it can vibrate and it can process sound at various levels, from playing back a tune via a speaker to figuring out what connotes a baby's cry for food. We can control these in sophisticated ways.

Is it easy to create Behaviour-Patches ?

Yes. Think Ringtones and Wallpapers. At its peak size it was a 5+ Billion USD annual market. It generated significant income for the music and content industry as well. The content ecosystem spanned thousands of content creators plugged into telco networks, driven by media and initiated typically by an SMS. One needed very little investment to create publish and distribute these, making a good margin in the process.

We see a similar evolution within the framework of Consumer IOT App Monetisation, with much more evolution in complexity, as is detailed below.

Can the thing be trained in some fashion to become Intelligent ?

Instead of passively responding to user-purchase, can the Thing actually become Smart in implicit and more complex ways ? Can the baby feeding bottle actually sense when the baby is beginning to cry and initiate a Thing Behavioural Sequence that calms the baby down - and improves in performance over time (reducing or pre-empting baby's crying).

Yes. Today's technologies permit fairly sophisticated AI/ML based techniques that allow all this computation to happen on small and inexpensive microchips.

Could the Thing become one's best friend ?

Doraemon, the legendary Japanese Anime character is a Robotic Cat that travels back in time to help the protagonist Nobita. Kids worldwide (top rated Channel in India) adore how Doraemon supports Nobita like a best friend, without noticing that it is actually a machine. 

Beyond edutainment and amusement, can Behaviour Patches help humanity at scale ?

Yes, the Thing can actually help combat loneliness, which is a rapidly growing epidemic of our epoch. Research indicates that loneliness is equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day in terms of health risk.

Things can help people feel less lonely and isolated in many ways. Again here we are looking at the "long tail" of content. Any lonely person could get their water bottle to get a personality by downloading a Robin Williams "Personality Patch". The water bottle is then transmogrified from a mere hydration artefact to someone with a quirky personality reminiscent of your favourite comedian.

What are Behaviour Patch equivalents in the fields of Healthcare IOT ?

Here, a Behaviour Patch would constitute a set of heuristics in terms of the sensor input that would trigger a notifications or a fairly complex diagnosis. Again, any doctor or expert in the area could "train a brain" and allow users to download this brain, which would perceive, process and interpret sensor data in a human-like fashion.

What are Behaviour Patches in the field of Sports and Motion Training ?

These are PRY Graphs - Pitch, Roll and Yaw graphs. The test data (what the user did) is compared to the Trained data (what is Sachin Tendulkar's Straight Drive) and diagnosis is giving a visually powerful interface. See my previous article here for more details on the ideas behind Motion Karaoke platform.

With Billions of Things, and technology moving inexorably at the pace of Moore's law and more, there be a Cambrian Explosion of such Behavioural Content Patches, creating value at scale in ways ranging from trivial to profound in ways that we may not be able to even fully visualise today.

Join us t www.rudralabs.com in co-creating such Generative Technologies - technologies that result in more potential uses than the creators could even imagine.