For a simple explanation of the Internet of Things for a beginner, it is the things or appliances which function by connecting to the internet. Our day-to-day life activities consist of things such as bread toasters which we use in the morning till setting up our alarm clock in the night, this technology makes our lives even simpler. It has the ability to connect all the devices to the World Wide Web, ie., very large information generated in the so-called “cloud“.
The Internet of Things is widely used in Industries, Logistics and Transports, Smart Home, Wearables, Precision Farming, Environmental Monitoring, Disaster Management and so on.
The Internet of Things has a high demand for technologies and solutions and a benefit for many sectors.
How does it work?
The Internet of Things (IoT) consists of all the web-enabled devices that collect, send and act on data they acquire from their surrounding environments using embedded sensors, processors and communication hardware. The Sensors or the actuators play a vital role here, as it is directly connected to the “things” and grasps the data from them. These “connected” or “smart” devices, can sometimes talk to other related devices and act on the information they get from one another. For example, you can control your home appliances through an app or website or even by your voice. Another example is that you have a smartwatch that monitors the health conditions of your body every day and gives statistical data. To say simply, the sensors in the things collect the data and sends that to the cloud which can be accessed only by the user.
History of the Internet of Things
Kevin Ashton coined the term “The Internet of Things” in a presentation to Proctor & Gamble in 1999. He is a co-founder of MIT’s Auto-ID lab. Also, he pioneered RFID use in supply-chain management. He started Zensi, a company that makes energy sensing and monitoring technology. Besides that, he later sold the company to Belkin. He has been involved in other startups, such as ThingMagic. He is also the author of the book How to Fly a Horse: The Secret History of Creation, Invention, and Discovery.
In a 2009 article, he wrote for RFID Journal, Ashton explained the term:
The fact that I was probably the first person to say “Internet of Things” doesn’t give me any right to control how others use the phrase. But what I meant, and still mean, is this: Today computers—and, therefore, the Internet—are almost wholly dependent on human beings for information. Nearly all of the roughly 50 petabytes (a petabyte is 1,024 terabytes) of data available on the Internet were first captured and created by human beings—by typing, pressing a record button, taking a digital picture or scanning a bar code. Conventional diagrams of the Internet include servers and routers and so on, but they leave out the most numerous and important routers of all: people. The problem is, people have limited time, attention and accuracy—all of which means they are not very good at capturing data about things in the real world.
And that’s a big deal. We’re physical, and so is our environment. Our economy, society and survival aren’t based on ideas or information—they’re based on things. You can’t eat bits, burn them to stay warm or put them in your gas tank. Ideas and information are important, but things matter much more. Yet today’s information technology is so dependent on data originated by people that our computers know more about ideas than things.
If we had computers that knew everything there was to know about things—using data they gathered without any help from us—we would be able to track and count everything, and greatly reduce waste, loss and cost. We would know when things needed replacing, repairing or recalling, and whether they were fresh or past their best.
We need to empower computers with their own means of gathering information, so they can see, hear and smell the world for themselves, in all its random glory. RFID and sensor technology enable computers to observe, identify and understand the world—without the limitations of human-entered data.
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