This 2019 you’ll see the Internet of Things (IoT) deeply embedded in our day-to-day lives at home and at work.
Soon, any device we own can go online and communicate with each other. Also in industry, tools and machinery are increasingly intelligent and connected. Generating data that makes them efficiently and enables predictive maintenance to become a reality. In fact, it’s predicted that by the end of 2019 there will be 26 billion connected devices around the world.
Here are five predictions about the Internet of Things:
The Businesses will get more serious about IoT
According to research by Forrester, businesses will lead the surge in IoT adoption in 2019. With 85% of companies implementing or planning IoT deployments this year.
IoT clearly offers huge benefits to businesses. Manufacturing, however, is the clear leader when it comes to IoT deployment. Throughout 2019, businesses will increasingly see the value in connected machinery that is capable of reporting every detail of its operating parameters and efficiency to other smart, connected devices. Predictive maintenance is currently only achieved by the biggest players who have invested heavily in IoT for several years now. With a growing understanding of when these solutions are useful. These solutions will start to trickle down to smaller organizations, that can be confident that their investments will pay off.
More vocal devices
The IoT will give everything we own a voice. Our voices are now how control the smart home devices such as Amazon’s Alexa hub, or Apple’s Siri. This will be the year that the rest of our possessions find their own voice. Virtually every car manufacturer is working on virtual assistants to help drivers more safely and conveniently operate vehicles. And voice control will increasingly become an option for industrial and enterprise technology.
Voice control makes sense in many ways as it keeps our hands free to operate controls that still need manual input, and our eyes free to watch for hazards. It also represents a further removal of the barriers of communication between humans and machines. Before, it was entirely dependent on programming with computer code. Now user interfaces and graphical environments and dashboards are used.
Voice recognition and generation, known as natural language processing; is the logical next step towards making technology that anyone can use to work more effectively or improve their lives.
Computing moving to the edge
Perimeter computing refers to the point where the network touches the real world, like the sensors and the cameras themselves.
The fact is that a huge amount of data collected by these devices will be useless. A good example is a security camera – it may have to pass terabytes of video data to a central server, or cloud, but the only data of any importance will be the few megabytes showing suspicious or illegal activity.
When these devices can carry out their own computation. Rather than dumbly passing information on to be processed in the cloud. The networks become less clogged and more available for the important tasks. In the previous example, the image recognition algorithms that run on the hardware. The software installed in the camera will analyze the sequences to detect suspicious activities. Only useful data will passed to the cloud for processing and storage.
Artificial Intelligence will increasingly drive IoT development and deployment
Artificial intelligence (AI) and IoT are related areas of technology. The IoT is useful and powerful because of the amount of data that it generates. When you have hundreds or thousands of machines connecting to each other in an industrial network, analyzing data is beyond the ability of humans. Training machine learning algorithms to spot outliers in the data that could indicate opportunities for efficiency, or provide early warning of an upcoming problem, is the primary task of AI within an IoT environment.
As IoT networks increase in size and complexity, they will become increasingly reliant on new developments in AI and machine learning. AI also has a huge part to play in keeping IoT systems secure, through automated threat detection systems.
5G networks will broaden the scope and availability of IoT
This year should see the switching-on of the first consumer-ready 5G networks. This could operate up to 20 times faster than existing mobile data networks. IoT is reliant on speed and availability of data services. Today there are still many locations that are effectively “dark” when it comes to smart, connected tech, due to a lack of availability of these services.
With networks that are faster and more stable than cable networks, IoT projects will become wider. The “smart city” will become a reality when services are connected in a network and the data analyzed to create cleaner and more efficient urban living environments.
The technology used by self-driving, autonomous cars, and public transport vehicles will also greatly benefit from the increased bandwidth available.
