5. Applications of IoT

IoT has applications across all industries and markets. It spans user groups from those who want to reduce energy use in their home to large organizations who want to streamline their operations. It proves not just useful, but nearly critical in many industries as technology advances and we move towards the advanced automation imagined in the distant future.

Engineering, Industry and Infrastructure

Applications of IoT in these areas include improving production, marketing, service delivery, and safety. IoT provides a strong means of  monitoring various processes; and real transparency creates greater visibility for improvement opportunities.

The deep level of control afforded by IoT allows rapid and more action on those opportunities, which include events like obvious customer needs, nonconforming product, malfunctions in equipment, problems in the distribution network, and more.

Example:

Gulshan runs a manufacturing facility that makes shields for manufacturing equipment. When regulations change for the composition and function of the shields, the new appropriate requirements are automatically programmed in production robotics, and engineers are alerted about their approval of the changes. 

Government and Safety

IoT applied to government and safety allows improved law enforcement, defense, city planning, and economic management. The technology fills in the current gaps,  corrects many current flaws, and expands the reach of these efforts. For example, IoT can help city planners have a clearer view of the impact of their design, and governments have a better idea of the local economy.

Example:

Gulshan lives in a small city. She’s heard about a recent spike in crime in her area, and worries about coming home late at night.

Local law enforcement has been alerted about the new “hot” zone through system flags, and they’ve increases their presence. Area monitoring devices have detected suspicious behavior, and law enforcement has investigated these leads to prevent crimes.

Home and Office

In our daily lives, IoT provides a personalized experience from the home to the office to the organizations we frequently do business with. This improves our overall satisfaction, enhances productivity, and improves our health and safety. For example, IoT can help us customize our office space to optimize our work.

Example

Gulshan works in advertising. She enters her office, and it recognizes her face. It adjusts the lighting and temperature to her preference. It turns on her devices  and opens applications to her last working points.

Her office door detected and recognized a colleague visiting her office multiple times before she arrived. Gulshan’s system opens this visitor’s messages automatically.

Health and Medicine

IoT pushes us towards our imagined future of medicine which exploits a highly integrated network of sophisticated medical devices. Today, IoT can dramatically enhance medical research, devices, care, and emergency care. The integration of all elements provides more accuracy, more attention to detail, faster reactions to events, and constant improvement while reducing the typical overhead of medical research  and organizations.

Example

Joan is a nurse in an emergency room. A call has come in for a man wounded in an altercation. The system recognized the patient and pulls his records. On the scene, paramedic equipment captures critical information automatically sent to the receiving parties at the hospital. The system analyzes the new data and  current  records  to deliver a guiding solution. The status of the patient is updated every second in the system during his transport. The system prompts Joan to approve system actions for medicine distribution and medical equipment preparation.

Marketing and Content Delivery

IoT functions in a similar and deeper way to current technology, analytics, and big data. Existing technology collects specific data to produce related metrics and patterns over time, however, that data often lacks depth and accuracy. IoT improves this by observing more behaviors and analyzing them differently.

• This leads to more information and detail, which delivers more reliable metrics and patterns.
•  It allows organizations to better analyze and respond to customer needs or preferences.
•  It improves business productivity and strategy, and improves the consumer experience by only delivering relevant content and solutions.

Improved Advertising

Current advertising suffers from excess and poor targeting. Even with today's  analytics, modern advertising fails. IoT promises different and personalized  advertising rather than one-size-fits all strategies. It transforms advertising from noise to a practical part of life because consumers interact with advertising through IoT rather than simply receiving it. This makes advertising more functional and useful to people searching the marketplace for solutions or wondering if those solutions exist.

Commercial Farming

Today's sophisticated commercial farms have exploited advanced technology and biotechnology for quite some time, however, IoT introduces more access to deeper automation and analysis.

Much of commercial farming, like weather monitoring, suffers from a lack of precision and requires human labor in the area of monitoring. Its automation also  remains limited.

IoT allows operations to remove much of the human intervention in system function, farming analysis, and monitoring. Systems detect changes to crops, soil, environment, and more. They optimize standard processes through analysis of large, rich data collections. They also prevent health hazards (e.g., e. coli) from happening and allow better control.

Intelligent Product Enhancements

Much like IoT in content delivery, IoT in manufacturing allows richer insight in real- time. This dramatically reduces the time and resources devoted to this one area, which traditionally requires heavy market research before, during, and well after the products hit the market.
IoT also reduces the risks associated with launching new or modified  products  because it provides more reliable and detailed information. The information comes directly from market use and buyers rather than assorted sources of varied credibility.

Dynamic Response to Market Demands

Supplying the market requires maintaining a certain balance impacted by a number of factors such as economy state, sales  performance, season,  supplier status, manufacturing facility status, distribution status, and more. The expenses associated with supply present unique challenges given today's global partners. The associated potential or real losses can dramatically impact business and future decisions.

IoT manages these areas through ensuring fine details are managed more at the system level rather than through human evaluations and decisions. An IoT system can

Lower Costs, Optimized Resource Use, and Waste Reduction

IoT offers a replacement for traditional labor and tools in a production facility and in the overall chain which cuts many previously unavoidable costs; for example, maintenance checks or tests traditionally requiring human labor can be performed remotely with instruments and sensors of an IoT system.

IoT also enhances operation analytics to optimize resource use and labor, and  eliminate various types of waste, e.g., energy and materials. It analyzes the entire process from the source point to its end, not just the process at one point in a particular facility, which allows improvement to have a more substantial impact. It essentially reduces waste throughout the network, and returns those savings throughout.

Residential Energy

The rise of technology has driven energy costs up. Consumers search for ways to reduce or control consumption. IoT offers a sophisticated way to analyze and optimize use not only at device level, but throughout the entire system of the home. This can mean simple switching off or dimming of lights, or changing device settings and modifying multiple home settings to optimize energy use.

IoT can also discover problematic consumption from issues like older appliances, damaged appliances, or faulty system components. Traditionally, finding such problems required the use of often multiple professionals.

Commercial Energy

Energy waste can easily and quietly impact business in a major way, given the tremendous energy needs of even small organizations. Smaller organizations wrestle with balancing costs of business while delivering a product with typically smaller margins, and working with limited funding and technology. Larger organizations must monitor a massive, complex ecosystem of energy use that offers few simple, effective solutions for energy use management.

Research

Much of current medical research relies on resources lacking critical real-world information. It uses controlled environments, volunteers, and essentially leftovers for medical examination. IoT opens the door to a wealth of valuable information through real-time field data, analysis, and testing.

IoT can deliver relevant data superior to standard analytics through integrated instruments capable of performing viable research. It also integrates into actual  practice to provide more key information. This aids in healthcare by providing more reliable and practical data, and better leads; which yields better solutions and  discovery of previously unknown issues.

It also allows researchers to avoid risks by gathering data without manufactured scenarios and human testing.

Devices

Current devices are rapidly improving in precision, power, and availability; however, they still offer less of these qualities than an IoT system integrating the right system effectively. IoT unlocks the potential of existing technology, and leads us toward new and better medical device solutions.

IoT closes gaps between equipment and the way we deliver healthcare by creating a logical system rather than a collection of tools. It then reveals patterns and missing elements in healthcare such as obvious necessary improvements or huge flaws.

Environment and Conditioning

One of  the greatest challenges in  the engineering of buildings remains management  of environment and conditions due to many factors at work. These factors include building materials, climate, building use, and more. Managing energy costs receives the most attention, but conditioning also impacts the durability and state of the structure.

IoT aids in improving structure design and managing existing structures through more accurate and complete data on buildings. It provides important engineering information such as how well a material performs as insulation in a particular design and environment.

Rails and Mass Transit

Current systems deliver sophisticated integration and performance; however, they employ older technology and approaches to MRT. The improvements brought by IoT deliver more complete control and monitoring. This results in better management of overall performance, maintenance issues, maintenance, and improvements.

Mass transit options beyond standard MRT suffer from a lack of the integration necessary to transform them from an option to a dedicated service. IoT provides an inexpensive and advanced way to optimize performance and bring qualities of MRT to other transportation options like buses. This improves services and service delivery in the areas of scheduling, optimizing transport times, reliability, managing equipment issues, and responding to customer needs.

Education Organizations

Education organizations typically suffer from limited funding, labor issues, and poor attention to actual education. They, unlike other organizations, commonly lack or avoid analytics due to their funding issues and the belief that analytics do not apply to their industry.

IoT not only provides valuable insight, but it also democratizes that information through low-cost, low-power small devices, which still offer high performance. This technology aids in managing costs, improving the quality of education, professional development, and facility management improvement through rich examinations of key areas:

•       Student response, performance, and behavior
•        Instructor response, performance, and behavior
•        Facility monitoring and maintenance
•        Data from other facilities

Data informs them about ineffective strategies and actions, whether educational efforts or facility qualities. Removing these roadblocks makes them more effective.

National Defense

National threats prove diverse and complicated. IoT augments armed forces systems and services, and offers the sophistication necessary to manage the landscape of national defense. It supports better protection of borders through inexpensive, high performance devices for rich control and observation.

IoT automates the protection tasks typically spread across several departments and countless individuals. It achieves this while improving accuracy and speed.

Policing

Law enforcement can be challenging. IoT acts as an instrument of law enforcement which reduces manual labor and subjective decisions through better data, information sharing, and advanced automation. IoT systems shave costs by reducing human labor in certain areas such as certain traffic violations.

IoT aids in creating better solutions to problems by using technology in the place of force; for example, light in-person investigations of suspicious activities can be replaced with remote observation, logged footage of violations, and electronic ticketing. It also reduces corruption by removing human control and opinion for some violations.

Home

IoT takes the place of a full staff:

• Butler – IoT waits for you to return home, and ensures your home remains fully prepared. It monitors your supplies, family, and the state of your home. It takes actions to resolve any issues that appear.
• Chef – An IoT kitchen prepares meals or simply aids you in preparing them.
• Nanny – IoT can somewhat act as a guardian by controlling access, providing supplies, and alerting the proper individuals in an emergency.
• Gardner – The same IoT systems of a farm easily work for home landscaping.
• Repairman – Smart systems perform key maintenance and repairs, and also request them.
• Security Guard – IoT watches over you 24/7. It can observe suspicious individuals’ miles away, and recognize the potential of minor equipment problems to become disasters well before they do.

Refrences: https://www.tutorialspoint.com/