The Internet of Things (IoT) is predicted by some to be the next technical revolution — a potential trillion dollar market. It may seem silly to expect your cell phone to be working with your refrigerator to automatically call in a grocery store order, but it’s gonna happen. They might use bar code readers, NFC tags, Bluetooth, micro-location and/or RF Id tags, but before you know it, you’ll get just in time deliveries of cat food.
And our cars…already manufacturers are offering models with collision avoidance, blind spot detection, self-parking and autodrive. And oh, kitty kat, that’s just the beginning. Soon our cars will talk to one another to coordinate movements better than a George Lucas robot army. The entire traffic system might be one big network to make traffic flow so smoothly that we’ll never be aggravated again by bumper to bumper traffic jams.
At Novation we believe the IoT revolution is for real and will make our lives easier and our world happier. It will also make a lot of people very rich, and hopefully create a lot of good jobs.
But I have a question…all these “things” we are connecting and coordinating through the internet…should humans be a part of the “things”? At Novation we are developing monitors for athletes and those monitors are connected wirelessly to the internet. So the athletes are already part of the internet. The data is encrypted and quite private, so it is safe, but these athletes are connected to the grid. And really so are you. Every one of you with a smart phone is part of the internet. And through your phone, texts for example, you are connected to others.
The next step seems to be connecting the people to IoT. You’ll not just be able to know how much milk you have left in the fridge and the expiration date, but you’ll probably also be able to know who drank the milk, where that person is this very second, and what they are doing at the moment. Doctors, or more likely their robotic assistants, will keep track of your health day-to-day, minute by minute. The data will not only help you live longer and healthier, but when accumulated, such data may help prevent the spread of disease, or track down causes and eliminate societal health issues. On the other hand, IoT connected machines will tell factory supervisors how fast workers are moving, what their error rate is, how much effort they are putting into the job. It will help make companies more efficient, but may make workers very uncomfortable.
In other words, an IoT that includes people has good and bad aspects. What do we do as a society to maximize the good and eliminate any bad? What do we do as product designers? Frankly, we at Novation don’t think technology can be stifled. It is going to happen no matter what. While the world will change due to this technology, with more and more automation entering our lives, the responsibility to ensure these changes are positive for humanity and nature is very human and in fact ageless. We need to depend on one another to make good and decent decisions. It may be a future filled with things, but it will be designed by humans. We need to make sure they are kind, thoughtful and caring.