“Early adopting of Emerging Technologies is
the engine for Growth and Carrier Success”
The Internet of
Things (IoT) is the extension of Internet connectivity with
electro-mechanical devices like smartphone, digital camera, driverless cars,
drones, robots and household appliances embedded with sensors and actuators. It also includes vehicles,
animals, birds that are provided with Unique Identifiers (UIDs) and have the ability to transfer data over the Internet, without requiring human-computer
interaction. Various embedded software systems,
wireless sensor networks, control systems, industrial automation, AI/IT-enabled
homes and buildings and many other electronic gadgets/devices contribute
to the IoT environment. One simple example is an App Life 360
which allows two or more smartphones to globally track one another. This App
helps for the safety of people who are on the move and away from their homes. IoT also includes products related to "smart home", home appliances
like the refrigerator, washing machine, microwave oven, dishwasher, room lighting
fixtures, thermostats, home security systems cameras, and other home appliances
which can be controlled via devices like smartphones, wireless/radio
controllers and smart speakers. In simple terms, IoT is all about connecting all intelligent devices to the Internet so that these can send and
receive data to enable smart devices to make smart predictions and take timely action. The pre-condition for successful
IoT operations are that all connected devices should be able to communicate and
interact with each other effectively so that
these can be remotely monitored and controlled. According to a report by Marina research, an estimated $3
trillion is expected to be accrued through IoT by 2025.
Main Components of IoT. Basically, the IoT
system is comprised of three main sub-systems:
- Cloud. The cloud platform is needed where data needs are the extremely high and normal
hard drive of a workstation is inadequate. The cloud collects real-time data of
varying formats coming from a vast number of sources and at a great speed. It
processes the data speedily and relays the outcome to the concerned
device.
- Network. This is the communication
link (Internet) among the different physical components of IoT, like
smartphones, electronic devices/gadgets connected to the IoT
system. The network collects data from the various
interconnected nodes and organizes it systematically to route
the right data to the right destination and at the right time.
- Things and Devices. The ‘Things’
refer to various electro-mechanical equipment /gadgets/devices / objects interlinked through
the Internet and perform various activities on IoT
platform.
Services provided by IoT. The services provided by IoT
platforms fall into three main categories:
- Data
Acquisition, Transformation, and Management (ATM).
- Application
development, including Event-driven logic, Application programming,
Visualization, Analytics.
- Adapters
to connect to Enterprise systems.
IoT Enabling Technologies. IoT is not a
single software or hardware device or Apps. IoT is an
environment-dependent upon many technologies like Cloud
computing, Big data analytics, Embedded Systems, Security Protocols, and System
Architectures, Communication protocols, Web services, Mobile Internet and
web Apps.
Steps
for Successful IoT App Development. Before
getting into the venture of IoT service provider, the IoT development agency
should thoroughly scrutinize the market for IoT app use. It is also important to
select a viable platform and competent knowledge workforce. Some common examples of IoT platforms
include single-board-computers such as the Beaglebone,
and Raspberry Pi, and microcontroller platforms such as
the Adriano series, boards. Most popular IoT platforms as per
2018 survey report are listed below:
·
Amazon Web Services or AWS.
·
Cisco IoT Cloud Connect.
·
Google Cloud Platform.
·
HP's Universal of Things
·
Microsoft Azure IoT.
·
Oracle IoT
·
SAP Cloud Platform.
·
ThingWorx.
IoT to create new jobs in India. IoT is a paradigm shift in job creation and overcoming the shortage of workforce
in areas like Agriculture, Healthcare, Transportation and Garbage disposal in
various cities. According to research and consultancy firm (Zinnov)’s a study in
2016. IoT might take away 120,000 jobs in India by
2021. Fortunately, until mid-2019, job losses have not been so huge. On
a brighter side, the spokesperson of the Department of Telecommunications,,
had stated in 2017 that about 10-15 million jobs would be created through IoT
in the next 5-7 years. India has a lot of capability in software and most of the
technological inventions/innovations are driven by software. If we judiciously
integrate telecom and computing capability, India can be a leader in IoT space.
However, security and data protection are two serious concerns on which
government is working on priority. Once we have a full-fledged data protection
law in place, it will have a positive impact on the growth of IoT and job
creation.
IoT Applications for Rural Economy. IoT applications are in many areas like agriculture, healthcare,
manufacturing, telecom, transportation (Rail, Road. Shipping), smart living buildings,
home appliances. Indeed, IoT can have a huge impact
on jobs creation and new business opportunities New report published in Nov 2018 by Broadband
India Forum (BIF ) had estimated that AI and IoT are going to create over
28 lakh (2.8 million) jobs in rural
India in the next 8-10 years. The study also added that these jobs would have an
annual worth of over ₹60,000 Crore (approx. US$ 8.9
billion). Out of above 28 Lacs jobs, nearly 21 lakh jobs will
be in the agriculture sector and the remaining 7 lakh will be in the healthcare
sector. The Government’s drive of job creation will further accelerate after
2021 by which time much-hyped 5G technologies for mobile communication services
will be implemented.
IoT for Agriculture. Agriculture is the most important component of the
national economy and needs to be supported with best research work and
technology. India's agriculture is
composed of many crops, like rice, wheat, pulses, potatoes, sugarcane,
oilseeds, fruit orchids and some non-food items as cotton, tea,
coffee, rubber, and jute. The agriculture also includes
fisheries, milk dairy farms, poultry farms, sheep /goat farms. BIF’s data had highlighted that AI and IoT related applications including satellite terrain mapping,
electronic/digital marketing, livestock traceability, climate sensing stations,
product traceability, and “smart farms ” in agriculture is indeed
a part of India’s digital revolution. AI/IoT driven
systems will improve harvest quality and accuracy, detecting diseases in
plants, pests and poor plant nutrition on farms. This will also help in
accurate predictability in agriculture output. The
smart farming technology emerging from IoT, AI, and robotics are already enhancing the efficiency of
the agriculture business. The smart implementation of
new technologies like IoT, Drones, GPS, GIS, and Robots help to yield
better and healthy crops, reduce the workload on farmers and helps in better
decision making in crop planning and trade. With the easy availability of GPS, farmers can do better crop planning get
more accurate field mapping, soil sampling for crop rotation. GPS allows
farmers to work during low visibility rain, dust, and fog. IoT facilities attempt to keep the farmers
updated about agriculture data related to soil condition, watering time,
weather prediction, crop growth, harvesting time, market selling rates. This
helps to maximize their income from the sale of their grain, produce, or
livestock.
Major applications of IoT
for Agriculture :
- Determining the optimal season and time to plant and harvest a particular crop.
- Determining fertilizer requirement based on soil conditions.'
- Sensing for soil moisture and nutrients.
- Right time for transporting agriculture produce to the processing factories / open market sale.
- Tracking the movement of animals.
- Interlinking dairy farms, poultry farms, piggery farms.
IoT also facilitates real-time health
monitoring and access to a patient’s health data, particularly of elder people. IoT will greatly help in
providing telemedicine and online medical assistance in remote areas. According
to Gartner, there will be nearly 26 billion devices on the IoT by 2020. These
devices will seamlessly collect and share information directly with each other
This information will provide insight into the health and follow up actions to improve the health a d satisfaction of the community.
IoT
environment for healthcare. IoT system in healthcare has three dimensions,
namely – Things/devices, Internet, Data acquisition, interpretation, and
Analysis.
- Things / Devices Perspective: Most real physical objects ( Electro-mechanical
devices ) can have the sensors attached to them to get the real-time
information from them.
- Internet Perspective: All the devices which
can be connected through the internet by allotting a unique IP address,
can be described as smart objects/devices.
- Data acquisition,
interpretation, and analysis. All the data collected from
various sensors need to be quickly and accurately analyzed for correct
interpretation. The medical sensors help to
convert environment data like temperature, pressure, humidity,
heartbeat rate, blood pressure,
blood sugar etc to the digital form and the actuators transform the
digital data to physical actions by machines like Infusion pumps, dialysis system, etc.
IoT applications in the Healthcare area. Some of the healthcare
applications of IoT are briefly given below:
·
Wireless patient monitoring: This application is for remote surveillance of a
patient’s vital functions by using internally and externally located patient
devices. In this case, healthcare information is shared in real-time
between patients and health caretakers. This is very useful for the management of chronic
diseases like hypertension, diabetes, coronary heart disease, asthma.
·
Mobile system access: This application is based on mobile technologies that enable
remote/virtual access to current clinical digital health records and picture
archiving.
·
Medical devices: This application is used to capture and track key care compliance and
disease management data. Mainly these are used as fitness solutions
for tracking of patient activities and smart diagnostic devices used for
capturing the data from the sensors for further analysis by a doctor. IoT linked
medical devices like digital glucometers, blood pressure devices, pedometers, the
wearable can use to perform assisted surgeries and recording.
·
Virtual consultation (telemedicine): This application uses remote connectivity and
multimedia solutions that enable virtual care consultation, health education,
medicine delivery, and therapy procedures. Through virtualization, the majority
of routine care can happen within minutes and even seconds. The remote
diagnostic screening has become common in some countries and markets. There
shall be the possibility to see the advent of telesurgery for routine
procedures using robots and nurse assistants.
·
Monitoring aged people: These devices are very useful as wearable
for monitoring the elderly people who may be living independently. The
vital data from the elderly people are acquired from the monitoring
devices and transmitted to a standard mobile device which acts as a network
node for transmitting the real-time data to the doctor. The information can be
used to give medical assistance to the needy person and in case of higher
abnormalities, the nearby efficient hospitals can be alerted and thus the
hospitalization costs can be reduced through early intervention.
·
Planning Healthcare Services. With rapid advances in electronics and embedded
software, a number of medical devices like glucose monitors, ECG monitors,
pulse oximeters, blood pressure monitors and so on are becoming wearable. All
these devices monitor, collect and store data in real-time. Thus IoT
enables health organizations to pick critical data from multiple sources
in real-time, and a has a better decision-making capability. This helps in
achieving higher efficiency, lowering costs and providing better
health care to the citizens.
Challenges for IoT.
Privacy
and security of data. IoT
environment has many challenges including technical, regulatory and
socio-ethical considerations. Protecting privacy is the main challenge. It
requires wholehearted participation of various government agencies.,
private sector players and civil society to ensure privacy, secrecy,
and security of patient data
Scalability – As the billions of IoT devices
get connected to the network, a large volume of data needs to be processed. The
system which stores, analyses this information from the IoT devices need to be
scalable The raw data from this connected world needs big data analytics and
cloud storage for the interpretation of meaningful data.
· Interoperability – Technological standards are not yet finalized. The convergence
of various technologies related to IoT needs to be expedited. Pending
standardization, interoperability of IoT with legacy devices is critical.
·
Lack of government support – The government and the regulatory bodies
should come forward to play an active role in bringing up required regulations
and standards.
·
Safety of patients – Most of the times IoT devices are left unattended, while these
are attached to the patients. If used on patients as implantable or
wearable, and a breach in security is considered very critical.
·
Security and personal privacy - The IoT in healthcare should ensure
Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability of patients’ personal data.
Jobs offered by IoT. Despite
a lot of criticism in regards to privacy and security concerns related to these devices, IoT has been
recognized as a source of enhanced productivity and higher efficiency. Building an IoT system requires a
multi-disciplinary approach. A basic IoT team includes an electrical engineer,
a mechanical engineer, an industrial designer, an embedded systems designer,
one back-end developer, one front-end developer, and a product manager. The
more knowledge each member has about the role of other team members, the better
will be the synergy and productivity. If you
are looking to pursue a career in IoT, you should learn new skills and upgrade your CV. Some of the highest paying and most lucrative jobs with
IoT are listed below:
- Product Managers. These are the professionals who keep an eye on the execution part of
the IoT project.
- SEO consultant. As the internet grows in popularity, so does the competitiveness of getting your voice heard online. For this reason, search engine optimization (SEO) has quickly become big business for, well, any business. By using the right channels, keywords, and other targeted strategies, companies can improve their visibility when someone goes searching for their type of product or service online.
- Data Scientists and Analysts. They are the key
people who can swiftly analyst large data and present solution which
enable devices to interact and take apocopate action
- App
Developers. Most of us
feel something missing if we leave our home without our mobile phone/smartphone because nowadays
no one bothers to remember phone
numbers by heart. We solely depend on address
book stored in our
mobile phone or maybe on the cloud, The app market has paved the way
for a new craze to stay connected and well informed using various
freely downloadable Apps. It may be messaging through What App
email, Facebook, Google maps, vehicle ( Uber Taxi) tracking,
Life 360 to track the movement of your family members/friends., weather,
sports news or music or a movie. These professionals who are good in
Python-like programming skills is on great demand.
- Business Intelligence (BI). IoT is all about collection,
storage, and analysis of streams of data from smart devices and decision making. One must understand the value of data and skills required to handle it. The skill sets include sensor data analysis, data centre management, predictive analytics, and programming in python, Hadoop and NoSQL. PowerBI, Tableau, Machine learning, and Elastic
Stack. To develop such skills one should take a basic online course such as introduction to Data Science, Hadoop, predictive analytics help factories improve their output while reducing cost.
Go and talk to a small scale Industry nearby to find out what
parameters should be measured to improve the output.
- Social
media Mangers. is
one of the internet’s most viral by-products and fast becoming responsible
for procrastination at its best. Companies are capitalizing on this global
obsession with staying connected by utilizing these digital networks, so
much so that the specialized role of social media manager has emerged.
Essentially, it is a brand management role designed to produce content,
promote conversation and monitor whatever social media platforms a company
uses
- Software
engineers. These are the software engineers involved in coding and developing various applications. Software engineers create computer programs that make technology actually work. Not only this, the best software engineers
create programs that make computing and, let’s face it, life easier If a software company builds bug-free
software, it can easily make
10% return on its investment. However, if it makes a poor job, it can make
a 40% return by selling upgrades and service but its reputation
cannot sustain. While the software is not necessarily reliant on the
internet, opportunities for software engineers have boomed with the
digital revolution as people turn to the internet to find quick fixes and
user-friendly solutions for just about everything.
- IoT
Architect /designers. They plan appropriate configuration and
implement the cost-efficient solution.
- Web developer. Web developers, not to be
confused with web designers, are the gatekeepers of the internet. They
create the web pages we happily browse through and are fluent in a
range of foreign computer languages that
most of us don’t even know the name of. Since the commercialization of the
internet, IT roles have boomed and web development continues to be one of the most sought after
skills in the job market
- Cloud
services specialist. Big data related to agriculture. health care, GIs, the weather is distributed and stored on the cloud. This requires professionals to handle data. Computer networking has been around for a while but the term ‘cloud’ has been gaining more exposure in recent times. Essentially it is using the internet to connect devices and share information. Apple is one of the
companies that can be credited for bringing the term to the masses through
‘the iCloud’ – a networked backup/sharing function between their products.
As the concept of cloud computing works its way into mainstream
consciousness, the demand for IT professionals specializing in cloud
services continue to increase.
- Robot
Coordinator and implementers. These are hardware/ software
experts who embed logic/algorithm in the robots used for
industrial automation
- Information
Security. IoT is already suffering from several DDOS attacks, botnet.
Security cannot be an afterthought for IoT devices. The desire to keep
information safe means that developers who are familiar with vulnerability
assessment, public key infrastructure (PKI) security, ethical hacking, and
wireless network security will be key players. Knowledge of Cryptography,
Authentication, Non-repudiation, Encryption, Ciphers, Public Key
Infrastructure, Elliptical Curve Cryptography, RSA, SSL, TLS,
DTLS and VPN will be added advantage
- Hardware Interfacing. Hardware
programming is essential if you want to develop yourself into an embedded engineer. Learning how to program interfaces such as GPIO, I2C is essential for success. Knowing at least one operating system, such as
Linux and one embedded system such as Contiki would be an added advantage.
Basic knowledge of Raspberry Pi, Arduino, GPIO,
USB, Bluetooth, Microcontrollers, is essential.
- IP Networking. In IoT environment, embedded
sensors interact with other devices around them. The information they collect is then sent to be analyzed. The network through which the information flows must be designed to be flawless, set up to handle large traffic and must be secure and reliable.. Routing, Switching,
VPN, MQTT, CoAP, AMQP, HTTP, SSL, HTTPS, Nginx, Load Balancing.
- UI/UX
designer. They are experts in evolving interfaces among machines and humans. Nothing sells if consumers can't use it. The interfaces between the device and the consumer must be effective and user-friendly. Responsive Web Design (dynamic visuals respond to screen size, platform, and orientation) and Service Design are the valued skills in this aspect. UX professionals marry the technical side with web design and user behaviour, designing sites that match the needs of the business and its customer's Knowledge of mobile Angular2, Front end, JavaScript, CSS, will help in developing the required UI/UX.
- IoT
applications in daily life. There are many applications of IoT in our
daily walks of life. It depends upon on consumer requirement
and ingenuity of the application designer. Consumer connected devices
include smart TVs, smart refrigerator, smart speakers like
Amazon Alexa or smart home like Google Home, smart
wearable (watches) like the Apple Watch, internet-connected
baby monitors, video doorbells, toys, and other smart appliances. Smart
meters, commercial security systems, and smart city technologies -- such
as those used to monitor traffic, weather conditions, soil
moisture for smart agriculture.
The physical objects /devices will work seamlessly
with machine-to-machine and human-to-machine interfaces. This level of
interconnection is a boon for healthcare, where health influencing factors both
internal & external to the human body can be quickly and accurately
analyzed. These factors along with the genomic inputs shall make it possible to
predict the health trends and allergies of the person. IoT based
mobile doctor buddy apps are not a replacement for the experience of the
doctors. IoT approach is only complementing the doctor with the
technology-based input. IoT healthcare devices with wider reach are opening a
new era of remote consulting, handling diagnostic devices for detecting
epidemic deceases like malaria and cholera.
Future of IoT. As we are
fast-moving into Digital World, various electrical and communication devices
are becoming a part of the electronics culture and people are fat adopting
smart devices into their homes and workplaces. The more data
that IoT devices collect about roads, railways, airports, parking
rest places, petrol pumps, hospitals, hotels, restaurants, weather, the
smarter they will become. Cities /towns will transform into smart cities/towns
through the use of IoT connected devices. Likewise, there will be a
transformation of agriculture farms to Smart Farm, Home to smart Home, Primary
Health Centre (PHC) in rural areas will be sharing valuable diagnostics and
expertise for timely treatment of patients. Some advanced countries
are already planning to have pilot-less navigation of commercial ships and
boats. With the integration of GPS and GIS, IoT will become part of our life
and work. It is therefore essential to embrace IoT technology early and
reap maximum benefits in this highly competitive global market.
According to a report by the McKinsey, the internet
accounted for GDP growth of 21% between 2006 and 2011 and this trend is
continuing to rise faster than expected. The same report revealed that the
internet has created 2.6 jobs for every job lost as a result of the integration
of many technologies. It is not too late to jump on the bandwagon and
ride the Technology Wave.
For more
articles, visit my blog http://sarbjit-share-knowledge.blogspot.com
For more
information you may visit www.amazon.com and
refer to my books/e-books :
1) A2Z
– 26 steps for assured success
2) Career
challenges during global uncertainty
Dr Sarbjit
Singh, Former Exec Director, Apeejay College of Engineering & Hony
Advisor, Apeejay Stya University, Gurgaon, Haryana,
122103, India
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