Internet of Things

As stated in the previous post,
let’s dig a little deeper into the “Internet of Things” or IoT in short.

As some of you may know, this term is very hot at the moment. There’s a lot of new possibilities in almost every domain because of this trend.

Now, for those of you who aren’t quite familiar with this term.
Let’s take a random object, let’s say your toothbrush. You know it’s your toothbrush and you like to keep it that way. There’s an obvious link in between you and your toothbrush, you use it and you have placed your toothbrush where it rests now. But your mother doesn’t know that link, she can’t know whether it’s your toothbrush or that of your brother.
Now, to solve that, we could use a low-tec nametag or a step further: RFID. In fact, IoT is closely linked to RFID. Giving a device a unique id.
But of course, there’s more to it! As the name suggests, it makes use of the internet to centralize that id, so it is even more unique.

So it’s just a fancy RFID system for your daily devices?” That’s indeed a good start! If we go back to our toothbrush example. What if your toothbrush could give you information on the amount of dental plaque? Even better, what if it doesn’t give you that information, but it sends it directly to your personal dentist? That may be a nice feature, but sounds super expensive. Well, that’s probably not true, with current hardware, and the use of our mobile devices as processing units, all of this is becoming feasible.

One more thing, we’ve been looking into devices now, but if you think of it, also people/companies are a part of the Internet of Things. In our example, both you and your dentist were uniquely identified and could have a connection. So by use of your smartphone, you yourself are also part of the IoT.

IoT can be considered as a shift in paradigm. “From anytime, anyplace connectivity for anyone, we will now have connectivity for anything”

I hope you guys can link this to our previous posts and use this info for the ones to come. If you would think of your personal surroundings, what device would you like to include in your Internet of Things cloud?