THE STATE OF IoT—2021 and Beyond

IoT is no longer hype—rather gradually evolving into table stakes.

It is transforming how technologies, devices, and people connect. 2021 is going to be the year of technology, enabling people and economies to recover, where IoT will be a key player.

In the pre-COVID era, IoT was largely a fancy for many organizations—an item that leaders eyed in technology window shopping and often moved past because ‘important things first’.

It was not that IoT’s use cases were passable or its benefits were ordinary—it was just that cloud and analytics had already siphoned off most of the IT budget. Before making a case for IoT, most organizations preferred to prove ROI from the technologies they just took in. Especially, for the ones undergoing a tectonic transformation from legacy, often IoT came a little later in the wish list.   

But then came the COVID. The pandemic brought a compelling use case of IoT—monitoring occupancy, temperature, or particulates in the environment, individual health state, etc.

Several industries have recognized that monitoring needs are here to stay and manually doing them is anything but scalable. IoT-led smart environments are the safest bet (literally!)

Here are a few IoT use-cases that will see focused investment in 2021.

 IoT in Telemedicine

In 2021, IoMT, Internet of Medical Things is the leading front of IoT—catering to the most fundamental prerequisite of medicine during a flu-pandemic, i.e., remote monitoring.

Telemedicine, facilitated by IoT is not just a resolution for contagious disease management— rather a scalable model for providing healthcare in distant geographies, underprivileged demographics, and home-care.

IoT in Reopening

No space is smart enough if it can’t sense safety parameters—the top-most one of our times being temperature.

Whenever offices and public spaces open, IoT can provide large-scale temperature sensing such as scanning a sample crowd with an infrared camera and capturing the face if a high temperature is detected.

IoT in Social Distancing

For pandemic control, we need to keep operations unmanned as much as possible. Facility management is a resource-intensive job where facilitators have significant exposure.

IoT can automate temperature detection, lift or door operations, and reducing direct contact of humans with frequently touched surfaces.

If you are contemplating adopting IoT technology for streamlining operations or enhance your products or services—this infographic will affirm your decision.