Different Uses for IoT in Real Life

"The IoT is big news because it ups the ante: ‘Reach out and touch somebody’ is becoming ‘reach out and touch everything’"

Parker Trewin - Senior Director, Aria Systems

IoT Is Revolutionizing the World

IoT is everywhere, and the market is growing at a rapid speed. Currently, the growth rate is 30% every year. By 2025, there will be 75 billion IoT-connected devices. A McKinsey analysis estimates that IoT will have a total economic impact of $4-11 trillion a year in 2025. That’s 11% of the total world economy.

In this lesson, we will review 7 industries and how IoT is changing them.

Industrial Manufacturing

The industrial segment is one of the fastest-growing markets. Industrial IoT (IIoT) is one of the fastest and largest segments in the overall IoT space by the number of connected devices and the value those services bring to manufacturing and factory automation. This makes hardware and software tools that monitor physical devices.

As IoT becomes more prevalent in industry and manufacturing. Especially with predictive maintenance from thousands of factory and production machines that deliver an unprecedented amount of data to private and public cloud infrastructure.

IoT use cases

  • Preventative maintenance on new and pre-existing factory - machinery
  • Increasing production rate through real-time demand
  • Energy-saving and new energy sources
  • Safety systems such as thermal sensors, pressure sensors, and gas leak sensors
  • Factory floor expert systems

Consumer

Consumer-based devices were one of the first segments to adopt things being connected on the Internet. Consumer IoT came into form as a connected coffee pot at a university in the 1990s. It flourished with the adoption of Bluetooth for consumer use in the early 2000s.

Now millions of homes have smart thermostats, smart lightbulbs, living assistants, and smart door locking systems. People are connected as well, e.g. with Apple Watches, Fitbits, and other wearable technologies. The consumer market is usually the first to adopt these new technologies.

The most known example of this type of IoT device is Amazon's Echo digital assistant.

IoT use cases

  • Smart home gadgetry: Smart irrigation, smart garage doors, smart locks, smart lights, smart thermostats, smart digital assistants, and smart security
  • Wearables: Health and movement trackers, smart clothing/wearables
  • Pets: Pet location systems, smart dog doors

This segment also has common traits with the healthcare market, with wearable devices and home health monitors in to which we will dive deeper in the upcoming segment.

Healthcare

The healthcare industry is something that concerns the lives of all of us and the use of IoT technologies can vastly help doctors and nurses to provide better care to patients and it has the ability to even save lives.

Through similar but more advanced wearable trackers that are found in the consumer market, medical staff are able to intervene in a medical situation much faster, saving costs, time and improving the patient's quality of life. The things that can be tracked range from asthma to cancer and even cognitive illnesses like depression.

The use of AI also allows doctors and nurses to have immediate access to accurate information about a diagnosis, possible treatments, and data about dosages of medicine.

IoT use cases

  • Wearable trackers that monitor the health of patients
  • Better customer experience through more easily accessible - appointment systems
  • Medical research using all the data from wearable trackers
  • Virtual doctor consultations

Retail, Financial and Marketing

This category refers to any space where consumer-based commerce happens. These include traditional banking services and insurance companies, but also leisure and hospitality services. We include financial institutions and marketing fields in this area as well.

The retail IoT impact is already in progress, with the goal of lowering sales costs and improving customer experience. Allowing customers to be more efficient allows retailers and service industries to move customers quickly, and to do so with less staffing resources.

IoT use cases

  • Targeted advertising, such as locating known or potential customers by proximity and providing sales information
  • Beaconing, such as proximity sensing customers, traffic patterns, and inter-arrival times as marketing analytics
  • Asset tracking, such as inventory control, loss control, and optimizing supply chains
  • Cold storage monitoring, such as analyzing cold storage of perishable inventory or applying predictive analytics to the food supply
  • Insurance risk measurement of drivers or other risk groups

Agricultural and Environmental

Farming and environmental IoT includes elements of livestock health, land and soil analysis, micro-climate predictions, efficient water usage, and even disaster predictions in the case of geological and weather-related disasters. Significant efficiencies in agriculture can be achieved through IoT.

IoT use cases

  • Smart irrigation and fertilization techniques to improve yield
  • Smart lighting in nesting or poultry farming
  • Livestock health and asset tracking
  • Preventative maintenance on remote farming equipment via a manufacturer
  • Drones-based land surveys and robotic farming
  • Farm-to-market supply chain efficiencies with asset tracking
  • Volcanic and fault line monitoring for disaster prediction

Energy

The energy segment includes the monitoring of energy from production to usage. A significant amount of research and development has focused on consumer and commercial energy monitors, such as smart electric meters that communicate over low-power and, for example, LoRaWan long-range protocols to real-time energy usage.

Many energy production facilities are in remote or hostile environments such as desert regions for solar arrays, steep hillsides for wind farms, and hazardous facilities for nuclear reactors.

IoT use cases

  • Oil analysis with sensors and data points for efficiency gains
  • Remote solar panel monitoring and maintenance
  • Analysis of nuclear facilities
  • Smart electric meters that monitor energy usage
  • Real-time blade adjustments as a function of weather on - remote wind turbines
  • Remote monitoring of wind turbines

Smart City

"Smart city" is a phrase used to imply connecting intelligence to what had been an unconnected world. Smart cities are one of the fastest-growing segments and show substantial cost or benefit ratios especially when we consider tax revenues.

Smart cities also touch citizens' lives through safety, security, and ease of use. Smart cities are also impacted by government mandates and regulations, adding ties to the government segment. One of the characteristics of smart city deployment may be the number of sensors used.

IoT use cases

  • Pollution control and regulatory analysis through environmental sensing
  • Microclimate weather predictions using citywide sensor networks
  • Improved traffic flow and fuel economy through smart traffic light control and patterning
  • The energy efficiency of city lighting on demand
  • Smart snow plowing based on real-time road demand and weather conditions
  • Smart irrigation of parks and public spaces, depending on weather and current usage
  • Smart cameras to watch for crime and real-time automated alarms

Congratulations!

You now have a basic understanding of how IoT is changing industries around us.

We can move forward. Remember, we don’t just want to understand how IoT is changing the world. We want to accumulate valuable IoT skills. With those skills, you can do your part in building a better world for yourself and everybody else.

Knowledge Check

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