IoT-Sensors

In 2014, at an infectious disease lab in Finland, health researcher Petteri Lahtela made a curious discovery. He realized that a great many of the conditions he'd been studying shared a peculiar overlap. While examining diseases that doctors consider unrelated—Lyme disease, heart disease, diabetes, for example—he found that all of them negatively affected sleep. 

 For Lahtela, this raised questions about cause and effect. Did all these diseases cause sleep problems or did it work the other way around? Could these conditions be alleviated, or at least improved, by fixing sleep? More importantly, how to do that? 

To solve these puzzles, Lahtela decided he needed data. A lot of data. To gather it, he realized he could take advantage of a recent technological inflection point. In 2015, driven by advances in smart phones, small and powerful batteries converged with small and powerful sensors. So small and powerful, in fact, that Lahtela realized that building a new kind of sleep tracker might be possible. 

Any electronic device that measures a physical quantity like light, acceleration, or temperature, then sends that information to other devices on a network, can be considered a sensor. The sensors that Lahtela was considering were a new breed of heart rate monitors. A great way to track sleep is via heart rate and heart rate variability. While a number of such trackers were already on the market, these were older models that all had issues. Fitbit and the Apple Watch, for example, measured blood flow in the wrist via an optical sensor. Yet the wrist's arteries sit too far below the surface for perfect measurement, and ple don't often wear watches to bed—where they can interrupt the sleep they're designed to measure.

Lahtela's upgrade: the Oura ring. Not much more than a sleek, black titanium band, the ring has three sensors that can track and compute ten different body signals, making it the most accurate sleep tracker on the market. Location and sampling rates are its secret ons. Since arteries in the finger are closer to the surface than those in the wrist, the Oura gets a much better picture of what's happening in the heart. Plus, while Apple and Garamond measure blood flow twice a second, and Fitbit gets that up to 12 times, the Oura captures data 250 times a second. In studies conducted by independent labs, this combination of better imaging and higher sampling speed makes the ring 99 percent accurate compared to medical-grade heart rate trackers, and 98 percent accurate for heart rate variability. 

Twenty years ago, sensors this accurate would have cost millions and required a decent-sized room to house. Today, the Oura costs around $300 and sits on your finger—which is the impact that exponential growth has had on sensors. The street name for this network of sensors is the "Internet of Things" (IOT), the growing network of interconnected smart devices that will soon span the globe. And it's worth tracing the evolution of this revolution to understand how far we've come.

 In 1989, inventor John Romkey connected a Sunbeam toaster to the internet, making it the very first 10T device. Ten years later, sociologist Neil Gross saw the writing on the wall and made a now famous prediction in the pages of BusinessWeek: "In the next century, planet earth will don an electric skin. It will use the Internet as a scaffold to support and transmit its sensations. The skin is already being stitched together. It consists of millions of embedded electronic measuring devices: thermostats, pressure gauges, pollution detectors, cameras microphones, glucose sensors, EKGs, electroencephalographs. These will monitor cities and endangered species, the atmosphere, our ships highways and fleets of trucks, our conversations, our bodies—even our dreams,"

A decade after that, Gross's prediction bore out. In 2009, the num of devices connected to the internet exceeded the number of peober o ple on the planet (12.5 billion devices, 6.8 billion people, or 1.84 connected devices per person). A year later, driven by the evolution of smartphones, sensor prices began to plummet. By 2015, all this progress added up to 15 billion connected devices. As most of those devices contain multiple sensors—the average smartphone has about

—this also explains why 2020 marks the debut of what's been twenty called "our trillion sensor world."

Nor will we stop there. By 2030, Stanford researchers estimate 500 billion connected devices (each housing dozens of sensors), which, according to research conducted by Accenture, translates into a $14.2 trillion dollar economy. And hidden behind these numbers is exactly what Gross had in mind—an electric skin that registers just about every sensation on the planet.

Consider optical sensors. The first digital camera, built in 1976 by Kodak engineer Steven Sasson, was the size of a toaster oven, took twelve black-and-white images, and cost over $ 10,000. Today, the average camera that comes with the average smartphone shows a thousandfold improvement in weight, cost, and resolution over Sasson's model. And these cameras are everywhere. In cars, drones, phones, satellites, and such, and with an image resolution that's downright spooky. Satellites photograph the Earth down to the half-meter range. Drones shrink that to a centimeter. But the LIDAR sensors atop autonomous cars capture just about everything—gathering 1.3 million data points per second.

 We see this triple trend of decreasing size and cost, and increasing performance everywhere. The first commercial GPS hit shelves in 1981, weighing fifty-three pounds and costing $119,900. By 2010, it had shrunk to a $5 chip small enough to sit on your finger. The inertial measurement unit" that guided our early rockets is another example. In the mid-sixties, this was a fifty-pound $20 million device. Today, the accelerometer and gyroscope in your cell phone do the same job for about $4 and weigh less than a grain of rice.

These trends will only continue. We're moving from the world of the microscopic to the world of the nanoscopic. This has already led to a wave of smart clothing, jewellery, and glasses, the Oura ring being one example. Soon, these sensors will migrate inside the body. Take smart dust, a dust mote—sized system that can sense, store, and trans_ mit data. Today, a "mote" of smart dust is the size of an apple seed Tomorrow, nanoscale motes will float through our bloodstream, Collecting data, exploring one of the last great terra incognita—the interior of the human body.

We're about to learn a whole lot more, about the body, about everything. This is the big shift. The data haul from these sensors is beyond comprehension. An autonomous car generates four terabytes a day, or a thousand feature length films' worth of information; a commercial airliner, forty terabytes; a smart factory, a petabyte.

So what does this data haul get us? Plenty.

Doctors no longer have to rely on annual checkups to track patients' health, as they now get a blizzard of quantified-self data streaming in 4-7. Farmers can know the moisture content in both the soil and the sky, allowing pinpoint watering for healthier crops, bigger yields, and— an important factor during global warming—far less water waste. In business, since lithe trumps lumbering during times of rapid change, agility will be the biggest advantage. While knowing everything about one's customers presents an alarming privacy concern, it does provide organisations with an incredible level of dexterity—which may be the only way to stay in business in these accelerated times.

And these accelerated times are already here. Within a decade, we will live in a world where just about anything that can be measured will be measured, constantly. It's a world of exceptionally radical transparency. From the edge of space to the bottom of the ocean to the inside of your bloodstream, our electric skin is producing a sensorium of endlessly available information. Like it or not, we now live on a hyperconscious planet.