IoT - A little deeper perspective on the potential use of IoT to assist in reducing the cost of damages from climate changes etc.
Climate changes are here to stay, at least for a long time and climate driven extreme weather? will increase - Not only will the frequency of extreme weather occurrences increase, but the extremities of them will also increase; storms will have more rain and faster wind speeds, cloudbursts will yield more water etc.
If we look into the various aspects, the population will have to adapt to living under these increasing extremities.
Prevention - Plan and build and rebuild to improved specifications, plan for increase in downpour and wind speeds and for rising sea-levels.
Early detection - early detection will reduce the cost of the damages, in quite a few cases before assets are damaged beyond repair or damage escalates.
Damage control/service - Cleaning up and repairing
This article is primarily on early detection - How IoT could be deployed and utilized to reduce the impact and thereby the cost and problems from damages.
Three types of rather cheap sensors could easily be deployed, not going into how an enterprise would manage the ecosystem which would be a necessity for e.g. insurance or home security companies.
A lot of damage prevention could come from deploying just cheap Temperature & Humidity sensors in houses and these do not require much else but battery and network.
Through this simple sensor it would be possible to get indicators of problems, where installed e.g.:
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The more sensors deployed in a house would increase the reporting resolution but also compensate for sensors damaged, out of network or out of battery.
Mixing in other sensors in an early detection grid could improve the detection reliability and the time to detection e.g. is there water in the crawlspace under the kitchen? Or is there a smoldering fire in a ceiling mounted junction box?
Most of the mentioned sensors are actually rather simple and cheap, and most people could themselves quite easily deploy these sensors through the app that usually is required to adopt, configure and manage the sensors and of course get alerts from. Just pay attention that the sensors are supported within the same ecosystem to prevent having an app to manage each sensor type.
For an enterprise wanting to employ IoT, there will of course be a cost of correctly mounting, configuring and managing the sensors at customers/clients, some of this work could be delegated to customers/clients or a third party that already provides managed IoT solutions - it will also be important that the sensors can exist in the same managed ecosystem, as to harvest potential synergies in detection across the sensors using AI. And battery life should be considered, as to not having customers/clients constantly changing batteries or being out of battery when shxxe hits the fan.
A suite of cheap simple sensors within a compatible ecosystem, will enable an enterprise to reach more customers, getting better coverage & granularity, helping more people protect their assets or protecting their assets on their behalf. Sensor data on a larger scale could also be used to forecast and thereby prevent or reduce impending damage to larger areas or communities. Ideally data could be aggregated across enterprises, having enterprises to work together on prevention, giving larger value to people by avoiding sub optimization of data collected in data-islands.
The sensors could be using gateways for protocols like Matter, Zigbee, Zwave, but could also simply be utilizing the WiFi that already is available in many houses. Many of the current managed IoT solutions, regardless use the house network, but some managed ecosystems provides gateways that utilizes 3g/4g and a battery backup for fallback as well as WiFi and 230V connectivity - This would improve any IoT solution through coverage and improving battery life since the protocols are optimized for distributed low power devices.
/EoR
Interesting. Thanks for your ranting :)