What is the IoT buzz? Sensors, cloud, and machines; it’s virtual, instant and connected reality; it’s going to make everything in our lives from lights to pots “smart.” IoT is ultimately bound to affect almost every aspect of our daily lives. I’m extremely excited about what we can achieve across so many areas of our lives, but I think it’s especially exciting to look at how IoT will impact our lives at home and how cognitive intelligence is driving innovation in healthcare and fitness.
What is a smart home? It is like a ‘butler’, you don’t need to teach the basics of how a household works; it’s a home with integrated intelligence that can analyze data, learn from it and make decisions. Want to save on your energy bill? Ensuring refrigerator door was closed properly, or eliminate the risk of fires caused by faulty wiring? this is the vision of Picostone – ‘Smart Homes’. The company has created a connected home energy management. ‘Butler’ app tells what appliances are on, how much energy devices are using and identify ones needing replacement. Picostone is revolutionizing connected homes, providing multi sensory user experience – touch, gesture & voice, leading to smart, intelligence and energy efficient homes. Picostone can “smart enable” a home for under Rs 20,000 ($325), making automation affordable, accessible and experimental for the aspirational mass markets.
Companies like Clinivantage are building standards, platform and devices that help connect “IoMTs- Internet of Medical Things'”; extending medical grade critical care into our homes with primary care providers monitoring and managing our health. Clinivantage’s open standards reflect the best architectural choices, enabling the wave of healthcare IoT devices coming in the near future. The security of sensitive data that passes through the IoT is a developing concern for healthcare providers, Clinivantage is solving these challenges through MyVantage.
Using their integrated sensors and systems, patients with certain types of heart disease can subscribe to cardiac monitoring services; or subscribe for more chronic and prevalent conditions like diabetes or blood pressure monitoring; enabling more timely interventions; opening new business models in which the devices themselves are not the most valuable piece of the puzzle, unlike the current healthcare system, but personalized and near real time service offerings.
IoT’s are ready to get very personal, they are on your wrist, and other parts of body. Actofit, a fitness and health tracker, can monitor heart rate, sleep patterns, and potentially check blood glucose and hydration levels. Fitness wearables are changing the way we exercise and maintain a healthy lifestyle, becoming our personal coaches, helping us with both instruction and motivation, transcribing body data into training advice. Actofit identifies and intelligently informs on fitness regimen; helps manage, improve fitness, and it can also make payments, control access to your home, office, or gyms, while measuring fitness performance and reporting it to your choice of social network and coach.
As we look into integrated IoT’s, the goal is to detect and alert care givers potential problems of abnormal vital signs and sudden changes in the health or home environment. With voice-activated interfaces in the home, simple commands “call a doctor”; offer reminders to take medicines or turn off appliances can be automated.
These connected systems will judge the activities across home, health or gadget; analyze if they fall within the range of normal, alerts the caregiver or family member/s to take action without infringement on privacy; its designed to recognize slow changes over an extended period of time that indicate a possible medical / service / appliance problem.
If you look at all these companies, there is a convergence of cognitive computing, sensors, cloud, machines, and humans; with a goal to intelligently improve health, wealth and style. A new wave of companies are ready to sprout! Sensors tracking data; cloud translating this to intelligence; automatically managing machines on the ground; enabling mobile; real-time responses; effectively making smarter homes, hospitals, offices, schools, etc and voila, we have smart cities.
We have an incredible opportunity; to our enhance lives, innovate new products and transform lives. We just need to make sure we seize the opportunity and put mankind in the driving seat of the technological transformation. It is expected by 2020 we will have 20-30 Billion connected sensors, The market for IoT devices, products, and services appears to be accelerating toward just such an inflection point. I think this is most disruptive, creating a wealth of opportunity over the next five years for start-up ecosystem.
