“The purpose of IoT is to improve life”. No more, no less.

During the last decade, we have begun to see IoT as a new concept of how interconnected smart devices can create new applications and new services. IoT is emerging in a whole range of sectors all prefixed by “smart”: health, living, transport, industry, buildings, cities and energy.

“You can in fact compare the IoT to the way our brain functions. The interconnection between billions of neurons creates new knowledge and new ideas. In the same way, the value of the IoT applications is in the interconnection between the individual smart devices.”

IoT research and development is becoming more complex, due to the already highly advanced level of technology, the global, inter-sectorial and interdisciplinary collaboration needed and the ever increasing demands of society and the economic global marketplace.

Development of certain enabling technologies such as Nano-electronics, communications, sensors, smartphones, embedded systems, cloud computing and software technologies will be essential to support important future IoT product innovations affecting the different industrial sectors and applications.

The industry experts point toward healthcare as a good example of the IoT vision. Using micro sensors, we can monitor our bodies and transmit the parameters via a gateway, most probably our smartphone, to a central database. Combined with other information about the environment, we will be able to get a real-time status on our well-being. Further, this status may automatically provide us information about what to eat, what to change in our environment to improve our condition, etc.

The point is that we are able to monitor our current status and trigger the correct reaction and behavior without human intervention.

Parts of the IoT vision are already in the process of materializing, but there are still many areas where we need further development. Miniaturization of the enablers, i.e. the devices, battery technology using more efficient materials, energy-harvesting mechanisms and improved intelligence of the devices; all of this is very important when implementing autonomous wireless smart systems.

Other aspects need to be addressed. Privacy, security and trustworthiness are among them together with accountability issues.

In our research, we are focusing on these issues by insisting that devices should by design support common standards for privacy, security and trustworthiness. In addition, with devices being independent of human interaction, there is an accountability issue to deal with. Some devices will be publicly some privately owned. So if bad behavior is detected, we need to know who is responsible”.

Standardization is also key to the proliferation of IoT services.

“The purpose of IoT is to improve life”. No more, no less.

There is a degree of competition between the different standardization organizations. What is needed is cooperation and division of work, so that the individual organizations specialize in specific domains, and when they propose a standard, it should be adopted by the other organizations.

Some standardization organizations are private, and here the same principle should apply: If a private organization proposes a standard, it should be adopted by the public organizations.

In my capacity as VP of Engineering at the BlueEast, I am part of the effort to build a common vision of the IoT and to coordinate activities to avoid overlaps between projects.

It is important that we enable the communication between all the projects in order to benefit from the potential synergies. This endeavor is in fact very much in tune with the very vision of IoT, which is basically about communication and exchange of information between nodes.

The same principle has to apply to the projects, because without this type of communication and interoperability, it is not possible to implement the vision of IoT.

One of the obstacles towards realizing the vision of IoT is indeed lack of common standards. We acknowledge and accept that solutions will be implemented using heterogeneous communication protocols and devices. But to ensure free exchange of data, communication interoperability and data exchange standardization should be assured at a high level.

We anticipate a mixture of solutions. “There will be different hardware or software gateways. The smartphone is a very powerful gateway, because it is able to collect and aggregate data, and it provides interconnectivity via the Internet. Other gateways may be a home gateway with one unit connecting wireless sensors, entertainment devices, etc. The TV with increased interactivity and Internet connection is another potential gateway.” The experts also point to the GSM telephone technology that exemplifies the features needed for implementing IoT applications.

The GSM telephone enables communication, interoperability and compatibility. This allows us to be connected to other devices wherever you are. The same principle applies to IoT, where things should have the capability to be connected anytime, anyplace, with anything and anyone ideally using any path/network and any service. The difference is that, in most of the cases, it will take place without direct human intervention.

The author is a cyber-physical systems enthusiast and currently serves as VP of Engineering at BlueEast (www.blueeast.com) - a technology development company of Orient Group of Company (www.orient.com.pk).

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