The internet of things is a huge technology. It is generally known as the connection of various computer operating devices over the internet. The internet of things brings the world together by helping connect devices and thereby improving their functionality to do much more than their regular purposes. Every company is switching to the technology and is incorporating it into their manufacturing standards. In this article, we will talk about popular applications of IoT that are taking over the world quickly.
Applications of IoT
1. Smart Agriculture
The practise of growing plants and livestock for consumer needs has been going on since time immemorial. Introducing the Internet of things in the field of agriculture is by far one of the most challenging and transformational discoveries. Agriculture farms use sensors, microcontrollers, location systems, and AI on their farms.
The main purpose is to increase the quality & quantity of production of crops, dairy, eggs, wool etc. Farmers can check on their crops, monitor their animals and stay up to date on the latest farming techniques.
The main steps in smart agriculture are:
- Data collection: Sensors are put all around the farms and these sensors gather information about the wind, soil, humidity etc
- Diagnostics: Systems analyze the data and derive conclusions about the status, process and problems on the data.
- Decision Making: If any problem arises in the data, the system or the human take the necessary steps to present a solution.
- Action: Finally, actions are done to solve the problem. Sensors collect new information about the solid, water, air and the process goes on.
2. Smart Vehicles
- Intelligent cars or smart cars are vehicles embedded with the internet of things technology. These look and work like regular cars except they perform much better than a regular car.
- Smart car drivers perform much lesser activities while driving and tech AI technology handles most of the hard tasks.
- Innovations such as sensors that control navigation, inform drivers on monthly maintenance, manage the car with the speed limit, notify the driver about traffic, weather conditions or damages in the car.
- Tesla Cars are electric cars that use AI based technology and sustainable energies. The Auto-pilot feature in Tesla enables the driver to choose a self-driving option where the smart car drives itself without any human intervention.
- By far, Tesla has sold around 500,000 cars in 2020 and produces over 1 trillion cars for further sales. Smart cars are in fact the future of IoT.
3. Smart Home
- Smart homes are the bright future of the internet of things. Every house is likely to include IoT automation in the coming future.
- Smart Homes are self explanatory. They use IoT technology to integrate home appliances. Smart homes connect home appliances such as locks, thermostats, microwaves, geysers, TV so they can interact with each other.
- Users can personalize their devices according to their choice.
- Popular examples include Amazon Echo, Philips Lighting systems, Samsung Smart things, Wink Hub etc. Smart homes reduce cost and conserve energy.
4. Smart Pollution Control
- With rising consumer needs, growth in population and demands, more and more industries are generating hazardous smoke and chemicals that are damaging the environment.
- Pollution is the biggest concern in the growth of every industry. IOT is helping control pollution to a large extent around the globe.
- The government installs sensors around the city that track and monitor pollution levels in the air. These sensors give real-time analysis of smoke from vehicles, industries, factories etc. Based on the information, the government takes necessary action to stop the damage.
- One such ongoing project is the initiative known as “Smart solutions to Control Air Pollution” in Dubai. The project aims to install sensors in the city to monitor CO2, NO2, SO2 and CO levels in the air.
5. Smart Healthcare
- Smart healthcare is an IoT based health care service system that is currently being used to impact and save human lives on a much larger scale.
- Technology integration in the medical field saves billions of lives every single day.
- Smart healthcare allows patients, families and doctors to communicate with each other easily and remotely. Sensors and actuators gather, retrieve and analyse information.
- Systems process the information and generate necessary responses to move forward.This method saves time and it is cost effective.
- Monitors analyse the health activity of the patient and generate responses.
- Robots are replacing nurses to take care of patient post surgeries. Surgical robots assist doctors in surgeries. These robots are sterilised and maintain much more sanitation than human beings.
6. Smart Cities
The Internet of things is capable of managing, tracking and controlling an entire city. This alone explains the power IoT holds and how much it impacts human lives. Smart cities have technology such as connected public transport, Traffic monitoring and control, Water level and flood monitoring, Weather monitoring, 24/7 Video surveillance, Connected street lights and so much more.
Major companies such as Cisco, Schneider Electric, Siemens, Microsoft, Huawei are being used to create cities that are smart, sustainable, tourist-friendly and secure.
7. Smart Grids
- Smart Grid is used in Industrial IoT(IIoT). It is the future of energy. Every 15 minutes Central station controlled power grids estimate the power and update their generators to reach the load.
- Outputs cannot be predicted for Renewable energies such solar and wind energy over the same time range. To generate sufficient power, grid operators maintain extra power plants that recompense the fluctuations.
- The industrial Internet of things has created a technology that integrates expertise and devices to change the operation of grids.
- Smart grids track the behaviour of electrical suppliers and consumers. This improves the efficiency, reliability and standards of electricity consumption and generation.
- RTI provides the data bus software, National Intelligence provides intelligent nodes or constrained nodes for handling analytics, Cisco provides networking and safety devices.
8. Smart Retail
Smart retail offers shoppers an automated shopping experience. Technology handles all the tedious tasks shoppers have to go through while shopping such as long queues. IoT applications for shopping offer customers much more choices to select from.
9. Industrial Automation
- Industrial Automation reduces human intervention by using Iot technologies such as sensors, computational systems, and robots to manage, store and analyse data or information. It handles operation and controls machines automatically without human involvement.
- Previously, manual labour was deployed to perform machinization. With the involvement of IoT, computers with programs have replaced humans.
- Automation implies “self dictation” or the ability to perform tasks automatically.
- Industrial Automation includes technology and devices that control automation and other industrial processes without involving human interaction.
10. Smart Supply-chain management
- With the world being more connected than ever before due to the involvement of IoT, customers demand much more transparency and real time analytics.
- Smart supply is the involvement of technologies in the supply chain to modify logistics and management.
- Given an asset, IoT devices can track and share everything about the asset such as its origin, its whereabouts and its condition.
- AI and blockchain further transform the supply chain and logistics application.
Smart Supplies reduce costs, help predict the future market trends and create better assets.
11. Wearables
Everyone wants to get their hand on the latest technology. Tech savvy people wait for Apple to release their latest devices and even confirm early books for the brand’s gadgets. Fit Bait, Samsung Gear, Sony Smart B Trainer are some of the famous wearables that include IoT technology. Wearable IoT is a billion dollar industry with customers from around the globe!
12. Industrial Internet
The Industrial Internet extends the Internet of things in the manufacturing and industry sector. It involves the use of M2M communication, embedded sensors, interconnected devices with industrial appliances such as energy management. The IIOT uses big data, machine learning and IT and operation technology.
The IIOT has a large potential market in the future.
13. Traffic monitoring
- The internet of things helps in managing and controlling traffic.
- AI based applications can sense heavy traffic in a region and guide drivers to take shorter routes. These applications collect data from real-world users and process the information to produce results.
- IoT provides estimated time of arrival, traffic in a region, destination, distance and so on.
14. Fleet management
- Fleet management through Iot gives access to fleet operators to automate the process.
- IoT gathers data such as route information, speed of the vehicle, number of passengers, path. This information generates messages and alerts to help drivers organise their route and journey easily. It can can monitor Driver performance for safety
15. Maintenance management
- Iot reduces the need for excessive labour to carry out routine maintenance checks.
- Instead of performing inventory checks manually and detecting problems, Iot sensors sense and record any slight changes and notify the authorities in case of suspicious activity.
- Rather than allowing a system to fail to generate a trigger, IoT sensors record real time data and gather information continuously.
Scope of IoT
IoT is changing the world every single day. It transforms cities into smart cities, it is running business organisations with efficiency, increasing profits and assets. All in all, IOT has a bright future and is set to take over the world by the year 2027.
Summary
In this article, we talk about the various IoT applications in the industrial and consumer sectors.