Tag Archives: IoT

16 December 2023
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The Internet of Things

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The Internet of Things

In today’s world, the term “Internet of Things” (IoT) has become an omnipresent concept. At its core, IoT is a network of physical objects embedded with sensors, software, and connectivity, enabling the seamless collection and exchange of data. The core focus is on making our devices more intelligent and interconnected, establishing a world in which everyday objects can communicate and collaborate to boost their functionality and efficiency.

What IoT actually is?

IoT involves a system of interconnected computing devices, mechanical and digital machines, or objects that are provided with unique identifiers (UIDs) and the ability to transfer data over a network without requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction. In simpler terms, IoT is the idea that everyday devices can connect to the internet and each other, enabling them to work smarter. From thermostats that adjust automatically to your preferred temperature to fridges that remind you to buy milk, IoT aims to make life more convenient.

A Brief History

The Internet of Things (IoT) originated in the early 1980s when a vending machine was connected to the Internet at Carnegie Mellon University. Coined in 1999, the term highlighted the potential of linking everyday objects online. By the early 2000s, technological advancements in wireless tech and miniaturized sensors accelerated IoT’s growth. This birthed smart home devices and expanded IoT’s reach across sectors like healthcare and manufacturing, shaping a future of seamless device communication and transformative impact.

Advantages of IoT

The integration of IoT brings advantages across various domains. One of the key benefits of this innovation is its ability to revolutionize convenience by automating processes and integrating devices, resulting in streamlined tasks. In the context of energy management, IoT plays a pivotal role in optimizing resource utilization, promoting sustainable practices and cost savings across industries like manufacturing. Another advantage is the improved surveillance and real-time monitoring, resulting in enhanced security measures and strengthened safety protocols. Businesses harness the interconnectivity of IoT to drive informed decisions, enhance operations, and deliver customized experiences, fuelling growth and creativity while boosting efficiency and competitiveness..

Disadvantages of IoT

However, IoT also brings some concerns. Privacy issues loom large as data generated by IoT devices becomes a potential target for breaches. Cyber vulnerabilities pose risks, raising debates about the balance between convenience and safeguarding sensitive information. Moreover, there is a growing concern about excessive dependence on technology, leading to conversations about the importance of human involvement and its consequences..

IoT in Smart Homes

The integration of IoT in smart homes ushers in a transformative paradigm. Picture a scenario where devices seamlessly interact—smart refrigerators not only manage groceries but also collaborate with online stores, autonomously placing orders as supplies diminish. This interconnectedness of IoT devices augurs unparalleled convenience, efficiency, and personalized experiences.

IoT in E-commerce

In the realm of e-commerce, IoT is reshaping business-consumer interactions. IoT-enabled devices detect low supplies and autonomously initiate orders. Retailers leverage real-time data for personalized recommendations, enhancing customer satisfaction. The integration of IoT simplifies transactions, offering consumers enhanced convenience and efficiency in their shopping experiences.

Conclusion

The discourse surrounding IoT often revolves around the balance between convenience and potential risks. While proponents emphasize the unparalleled ease and efficiency IoT brings, critics raise poignant concerns about privacy invasion and interconnected devices’ inherent vulnerabilities. Striking a balance between these viewpoints necessitates stringent regulations to mitigate risks while harnessing IoT’s potential. In addition, there is a pressing concern about the potential over-dependence on technology, giving rise to discussions about the essential role of human involvement and its effects. As these technologies continue to intertwine, ensuring data security and privacy becomes crucial, despite the promised convenience and efficiency. IoT’s progress reflects its diverse capabilities, demanding a mindful fusion of innovation and ethical factors to define this interconnected environment.

Sources:

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17 March 2021
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A short introduction to IoT, 5G, 6G, and how to benefit from it?

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Around 50 years ago it happened to be clear that the world will never be the same place again. The internet revolution has started. Today, we are continuing that process and the pace of changes is only increasing. Overall trends show that the differences between technological domains are blurring to answer the demand of modern society. The result of that is the birth of IoT applications in various domains, both on the specialized and mass market.

This in turn gives tremendous business and career opportunities for all types of specialists from various domains, because:

There is no smart city without smart sensors.

Smart sensors need an embedded AI.

Embedded AI requires data scientists.

This short scene shows the mechanism on how different technologies (in this case AI) are intertwined with the IoT. Unfortunately, this causes a high degree of uncertainty and is making business/career decisions more complex. In order to act wisely, you need a good understanding of the roots of these technologies.

Internet of Things (IoT)

As you probably might guess the Internet of things is a concept that is a little mixed up. So, I would like to divide it into two components: the internet & the things to introduce it that way.

Internet

Firstly, we need to look at the very basics and acknowledge that the existence of our universe is possible thanks to the 4 fundamental forces of nature: Gravity, The weak force, Electromagnetism, and The strong force.

For us, the most important is Electromagnetism, which throughout the past centuries we were trying to tame and benefit from. It was pretty unsuccessful, until the 19th century when we started to process the energy in more sophisticated ways.

Zdjęcie autorstwa Suzy Hazelwood z Pexels

At that time we uncover the potential of radio frequencies and made developments like electric light, transformer, wireless communication, etc.

If you are familiar with the early history of the internet you probably recognize the name ARPANET, which was a military program developed to connect the university centers in the United States. The next step was the creation of Internet Protocol (IP), soon after that the 1G cellular system was born and the rest of the story you know.

Things

As you can see the Internet was initially created to connect specialized machines with at least a bit of computing power such as computers and in the later steps mobile devices. On the other hand, back in the ’70s, there were initial applications of machine-to-machine communication (M2M).

You might ask, how is today’s IoT different, from what it was in the past?

A great answer to this question is a quote by iotforall:

„The biggest difference between M2M and IoT is that an M2M system uses point-to-point communication. An IoT system, meanwhile, typically situates its devices within a global cloud network that allows larger-scale integration and more sophisticated applications. Scalability is another key difference between M2M and IoT. „

Let’s quickly visualize the power of IoT in practice.

Giving the example of healthcare true flawless experience might look like that: mattresses monitoring your sleep, chairs monitoring your posture, various medical devices testing your condition, microphones collecting the data about your cough to monitor lungs conditions, etc. This in turn shows that we need billions of more connections than we have today and it only is possible with the new generation of telecommunication architecture.

5G, 6G

The answer to this demand is an improved technology of the 5th generation (5G) of cellular communication protocols, rules, and methodologies issued by IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers)

It is mainly focused on:

  1. The wide availability of the signal (enhanced mobile broadband)
  2. Significantly decreased latency compared to 4th generation technology, especially useful for applications requiring critical reliability e.g. remote surgical operations
  3. Enhanced machine to machine communication up to 1 mln devices per 1 square kilometer

Technology still faces many challenges both in engineering and societal aspects. As you can see many challenges addressed by the IoT advocates are not going to be solved with the rise of 5G architecture. Cellular of the fifth generation might soon become outdated and that is why various R&D departments are already working on the 6G.

It is projected that the next few decades are going to be a constant transition process between new generations of cellular technology. Henceforth, it is obvious that 4G, 5G, 6G will overlap it selves and it would be hard to talk about one of them individually in terms of predictions. That is why I would like to describe more in detail the future potential business opportunities as the result of these three.

It is projected that by 2030 the overall telecommunication advancements will allow:

  • Transfer of senses like smell

I would like to disclaim that this is going to be my private observation, that with the rise of political trends and ideas to give every person a salary from the first day of birth, this will have hundreds of results (not rating good/bad) and one of them will be the increasing boredom. The rise of all sorts of gaming apps using this feature is just a marvelous way to create new experiences and disrupt the entertainment sector.

  • Inch perfect localization services

Space! The answer to an unbreakable internet connection all around the world. Satellite-based internet is a huge opportunity to enter growing markets like e.g. Nigeria. Many of the services that Google wanted to provide to this country failed due to low internet connection. In the next decade, it will change for the better. It is worth to mention almost everybody in Nigeria is a smartphone user.

Another aspect is the production and management of the data gathered throughout the satellites. Geospatial analytics is a great source of knowledge e.g. ability to measure the amount of gasoline in Saudi Arabian Oil Tanks and send this data to the NYC stock exchange to see how is the relation of stock prices to the real demand.

Not to mention GPS advancements that will make navigating, targeting, etc. more efficient.

How to benefit from it?

I hope that now, you have just a bit broader sense of how it all will be in the future and that now we are just starting.

Huge problems usually are followed by huge earnings if solved. Here is the list of problems and few interdependencies that might help build your future business model/career.

Problems:

  1. Connectivity — discovering the ways to establish a reliable wireless connection. As we already know, the connection is just a radio wave of a certain frequency, hence it can be modulated. This modulation could be „smart” in the future thanks to Deep Learning and Machine Learning.
  2. Continuity — optimizing the battery life. How to predict long-term battery life by analyzing data from charge-discharge cycles?
  3. Compliance — be up to date with evolving regulations. As AI is improving financial services compliance, it has a significant potential for smart management of constantly changing regulations.
  4. Coexistence — billions of devices per km2 means billions of data that need to be processed. Smart sensors with embedded AI is a crucial element of industry 4.0
  5. Cybersecurity — a secure connection is the most important part of IoT. Which technology will make it possible? Blockchain IoT has a projected 45% CAGR, what will be the successor of NFC (near-field-connection)? Many questions little answers = good business opportunity.

Interdependencies:

  • The transformation process will not happen overnight, 5G is very different from 2,3,4G because it is now when the Industrial revolution will be possible. Adding a coronavirus and the tendencies to move industry production from China back to Europe all give opportunities for businesses focusing on adapting Europe’s industry to new circumstances. All solutions connecting the old infrastructure with the new technologies are going to be crucial.
  • In the IoT world embedded AI will be used very often and a certain degree of independence requires applied algorithms to be reliable. To do that the algorithms will have to be certified. If you like law and science maybe such a research center is a good career choice.
  • As space will be a fundamental part of IoT systems and you would have an opportunity to work in a NewSpace company it is highly possible that you will benefit financially and you will have long-term stable employment.

TLTR

Motion is everything. We are entering a time when the motion of people, cars, ships, etc. will be tracked and the data produced this way will be the new oil of our century. To benefit from it, you need to solve some issues named as 5 C’s of IoT and follow the newest media coverage about Industry 4.0 and the space race.

Sources:

https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Regional-Presence/ArabStates/Documents/events/2019/EMF/Session5_P1.3_RKB_ITU_AI%20IOT%20SMART%20SUSTAINABLE%20CITIES_EMF.pdf

https://www.3gpp.org/technologies

https://medium.com/coding-in-simple-english/the-future-of-iot-is-ai-4b410ae3bd6d

https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/how-ai-is-starting-to-influence-wireless-communications

https://storageprdv2inwink.blob.core.windows.net/e62cd85b-846c-4086-ab9d-8bc0702924b4/4dff655c-c839-4205-bcf4-1f553a0e299e

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13 January 2021
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Makro got supersmart and superfast

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Everyone has been at least once standing in a never-ending que in supermarket, waiting to pay for stuff in your basket. In the last few years, we see a trend that many people are using self-service cash registers or scan and go systems, if they are available.

Let’s look how this scan and go works. You walk in a shop, grab a stroller together with a small scanner and you are ready to shop. Some stores also offer a mobile app which you can use instead of the scanner. Before placing any item into your basket, you easily scan it. When you are ready to leave the shop, you simply go to self-service registers which will read your scanner, pay your purchase and you can leave without waiting in line. That sound very efficient, however in reality you must often wait anyway to be randomly checked if your bill has everything that you have in your bag. From very quick and easy shopping to very inefficient waste of time.

In majority of supermarkets Makro in Czech Republic, Hungary, Turkey, and Israel offer the same scan and go, but with new supersmart innovation. Company Bizerba together with Israeli start-up Supersmart developed a system, that fastens and automatize whole shopping experience.

So, from now on, when using scan and go in Makro, you just place your stroller into special gate, which will check your scanned shopping list, check the weight of your stroller, compare individual purchased items with all similar transactions in real time and, if necessary, it can work with the purchase history of a specific customer. The last factor in the automatic visual inspection of the contents of the purchase. All this in less than 60 seconds.

And if the Supersmart gate finds out some problems, it notifies the customer and automatically recommends relevant products, which the customer may have forgotten to scan. If there will be any problem with the transaction, the service can be called, but other than that – whole shopping experience could be contactless.

This innovation is very helpful not just because it is very time efficient, but it also saves our nerves as well as our backs. No more loading, unloading, loading back and unloading to car and than again unloading to your fridge.

Sources:

https://www.czechcrunch.cz/2020/12/bez-pokladny-i-namatkove-kontroly-v-makru-nakup-pri-platbe-primo-v-kosiku-bleskove-zkontroluje-specialni-brana/

https://www.idnes.cz/ekonomika/test-a-spotrebitel/supersmart-nakupy-budoucnosti-bizerba-makro.A201202_144011_test_fih

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31 December 2020
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EU encourages people to use Internet of Things as a tool for smaller energy consumption

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Internet of thing has already become a part of ordinary household in many countries. We use online assistant devices – such as Alexa, Google or Siri, we have washing machines which we can control through mobile device or we can start to cook dinner in the oven when we are on our way home. In these cases, the usage of Internet of Things is up to every individual, but in the next few years, every household should have device running online, which will help them to be more energy efficient.

European Union is trying to set some rules in order to be more energy efficient and be more eco-friendly to our planet. For that, they are counting also on Internet of things which should be used in gathering information about consumption of households in every country belonging to EU.

Directive 2018/2002 of the European Parliament and of the Council is editing the directive on energy efficiency 2012/27/EU, which concentrates on more ecological actions of countries in EU. The most current topic is reducing final consumption of heat and hot water of each facility. The goal of this directive is to ensure that the owner or tenant of a property will monthly (in Czech Republic it is now only once a year or every 4 months) receive detailed billing of their consumption of electricity and hot water. As a result, the owner or tenant can adapt their consumption according to their monthly billing.

This billing should be consisted of:

  • Price and actual consumption of energies
  • Comparison with previous month consumption
  • Comparison with standardized consumer
  • Composition of energy sources

For this reason, everywhere in Czech Republic, starting from the 1.1. 2027 there must be installed only electro meters which will be possible to read (count down) remotely. People can choose from 2 variations – “walk-by” systems for which a person must come nearby to the meter, or systems on the base of Internet of Things which automatically download the data and send it every month to the administrator. “Walk-by” systems have cheaper starting investment, but in long term, they are more expensive because of not automatic count down. That will mean that nearly every property in Czech (and hopefully EU) will have, by the year 2027, installed IoT device.

Resources:

ŠVARCOVÁ, Hana. Nové předpisy ke snížení energetické náročnosti bytového družstva: Prezentace. Ministerstvo průmyslu a obchodu. 2020. Dostupné také z: https://www.dumplnyuspor.cz/bd/webinar-nove-predpisy-ke-snizeni-energeticke-narocnosti-bytovych-domu/

Praktický rádce pro SVJ: Vznikne povinnost dálkově odečítat bytová měřidla a častější vyúčtování nákladů na teplo a teplou vodu podle směrnice EU? [online]. [cit. 2020-12-31]. Dostupné z: https://www.radceprosvj.cz/nove-clanky/povinnost-dalkovych-odectu-vodomeru-indikatoru/

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7 November 2017
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Now Amazon lets strangers inside your home

Reading Time: 3 minutesHave your ever thought, how convenient it might be to have your package delivered inside your house or apartment when you are not at home, or get your friends to access your place to feed your cat, when you forgot to give them a key? Well, Amazon had already been thinking about such opportunity for a while.

In fact, the world of IoT is not sleeping and is in the process of creation of new things to make your life easier. On October 25th, 2017, Amazon has launched a new service to comfort its customers at most – the Amazon Key to allow an in-home delivery.

The idea behind that is to allow the Amazon courier to deliver the packages, you have ordered, to your place and leave it behind your front door, even if you are out of your place. Amazon has gone much further than just the smart key, as it provides a whole kit of services, like cloud camera, smart lock and application. For now, the service is available only for Amazon Prime users and it costs around 250$.

So, how does it work?

You order from Amazon and on the day of delivery you are notified that your package is about to arrive. Then, it is just up to you to authorize a carrier to enter your house or not. And, if you’ve decided to let a stranger to come in, the smart lock will open the door. Though, to ensure full security of your belongings, you get the chance to watch the stranger-carrier through the camera installed in front of your door, which starts working when there is motion detected.

Besides, you are also able to allow your entrusted people to enter your place by the same way – authorizing them through the application.

Isn’t it great?! Isn’t it a good solution to manage your tasks at home, while being not at home?

Unfortunately, according to Recode, only 5% of Americans and 4% of Prime Amazon users would definitely add this new tech to their homes, while 60% would not take this step.

But, why there is such a negative reaction to this new and so convenient tool? The answer is easy – security! There rises a tough question – do you trust people to enter your house, even if they are watched? The reason for such attitude is that the security is based only on one small camera that is supposed to record every motion that is going on inside your house.

Therefore, according to The Verge,  the cloud cam would be able to learn what are the normal in-house motions, like your dog, cat or your child and in future, it would easily distinguish some foreign to your house triggers in order to produce various alerts (the camera is also installed with microphone and speakers).

In result, it is up to you – to step on the side of safety or the side of convenience.

Though, there is always a question of security as we are entering a new way of living, by allowing technology to make a great change in the things that we are so used to. But, maybe, it is worth giving up some old norms, patterns and habits and open new doors to the other era.

 

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