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Chapter 1 ■ What Is the Internet of thIngs?
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The essence of the IOT is simply interconnected devices that generate and exchange
data from observations, facts, and other data making it available to anyone. While there
seems to be some marketing efforts attempting to make anything connected to the
Internet an IOT solution or device – not unlike the shameless labeling of everything ‘cloud’,
IOT solutions are designed to make our knowledge of the world around us more timely
and relevant by making it possible to get data about anything from anywhere at any time.
As you can imagine, if we were to connect every device around us to the Internet and
make sensory data available for those devices, it is clear there is potential for the number
of IOT devices to exceed the human population of the planet and for the data generated
to rapidly exceed the capabilities of all but the most sophisticated database systems.
These concepts are commonly known as addressability and big data and are two of the
most active and debated topics in IOT.
However, the IOT is all about understanding the world around us. That is, we can
leverage the data to make our world and our understanding of it better.
The Internet of Things and You
How do we observe the world around us? The human body is a marvel of ingenious
sensory apparatus that allows us to see, hear, taste, and even feel through touch anything
we encounter. Even our brains can store visual and auditory events recalling them at
will. IOT solutions mimic many of these sensory capabilities and therefore can become
an extension of our own abilities. While that may sound a bit grandiose (and it is), IOT
solutions can record observations in the form of data from one or more sensors and make
them available for viewing by anyone anywhere via the Internet.
Sensors are devices that produce either analog or digital values. We can then use the
data collected to draw conclusions about the subject matter. This could be as simple as
a sensor to detect when a door, window, or mailbox is opened. In the case of a switch on
a mailbox, the knowledge we gain from a simple switch opening or closing (depending
on how it is implemented and interpreted) may be used to predict when incoming mail
has arrived or when outgoing mail has been picked up. I use the term predict because the
sensor (switch) only tells us the door was opened or closed, not that anything was placed
in or removed from the mailbox itself – that would require additional sensors.
A more sophisticated example is using a series of sensors to record atmospheric data
such as temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, wind speed, ambient light, rainfall, etc.,
to monitor the weather that allows us to perform analysis on the data to predict trends in
weather. That is, we can predict within a reasonable certainty that precipitation is in the area.
Now, add the ability to see this data not only in real time (as it occurs), but also
remotely from anywhere in the world, and the solution becomes more than a simple
weather station. It becomes a way to observe the weather about one place from anywhere
in the world. This example may seem to be a bit commonplace since you can tune into
any number of television, web, and radio broadcasts to hear the weather from anywhere
in the world. But consider the implications of building such a solution in your home. Now
you can see data about the weather in your own home!
In the same way, but perhaps on a smaller scale, we can build solutions to monitor
plants to help us understand how often they need water and other nutrients. Or perhaps
we can monitor our pets while we are away at work. Further, we can record data about
wildlife in our area to better understand our effect on nature.