The Internet of Things ? What's that ? (A relative explanation)

I can't help but to take this question literally when I come across it. So looked first to the Oxford English dictionary, the Internet of Things is in essence, a way of telling you about something but in particular using a computer network to do so.

Control

The intention of the Internet of Things is to digest and control these objects in a way that we typically do not, currently. It was not that long ago, that the television had buttons which required you to get up off your sofa, walk across the living room floor and push with an almighty THUNK as the button hit home (if you could call it a button) and changed the channel. Some television sets directly had the tuning dial instead to get the channel you wanted!

Not long after, the concept of the remote control was born. The buttons were no longer on the television! instead, they were on a box, connected seemingly via some strange rope or string that helped this box tell the television what channel you wanted. Then the unthinkable happened. It was neutered and the cord was cut. Wireless remote controls were then the norm and it wasn't until even more recently, that this migrated, on some televisions, to be integrated with your mobile phone via software where it mingles with TV Guides to even let you know what's on next.

In this case, the television is a 'thing' and the remote control is the part that has helped it to become potentially accessed over the internet (without even touching on streaming audio or video to it) because once it's on say, your phone, there's little to no reason why it can't be controlled via your computer. In some households it is.

Measure, Observe and Feedback

This is the part that's difficult to quantify because it is potentially very open to interpretation, at present the Internet of Things is seen to utilise sensors to act upon such as:

And so on for measurement. Where it differs with standard, engineered practices for using a sensor, for example using a temperature sensor to make sure that a motor doesn't overheat out of specification for safety or an infra-red sensor as part of a limit switch; these sensors are attached to objects that typically wouldn't have them attached.

For example (because I like lists):

• A capacitive sensor/sheet attached to a door, to tell when a person knocks on it
• An acoustic sensor to detect when a dog is barking
• Accelerometer to a persons arm as a way of identify what type of exercise they're undertaking. You could also have a pressure and humidity sensor in your umbrella as a way to detect if you should be opening it soon.

This is where observation also feeds into it. These objects are now becoming devices that report their status and become aware of what situation they are in. This can be very valuable and the data fed back in some form from these self-aware objects can be collated together to provide valuable information about a scenario or person for the purpose of safety, entertainment or education.

Connected

Or perhaps this heading should be 'mobility' or 'accessibility' because basically you get the information from your sensors and their respective controls then you make it accessible via a medium that's remote from being stood or sat in front of the device and watching it; like you used to do with your television except now you can watch and control your television (at the very least the content of it) from anywhere (but with the advent of 'smart' televisions and the BBC releasing an API (TAL) for it this is also possible).

So this connectivity could be from your phone over Short Message Service (SMS), a local network (WiFi or LAN or CAN) and even the global internet . Hence the name, Internet of Things or, by some, Internet of Everything.

Problems to Overcome

The Internet of (Every)Thing(s) has potential problems. These problems are partly based around:

• Transport infrastructure of the data collected.
• Presentation and storage of the data into tangible and coherent and relevant information.
• Integrity, security and privacy of valuable and sensitive information from collection through to presentation.

Transportation

The transport infrastructure, if we consider that all communications from these devices may move to an Internet Protocol (IP) based system will rely on the ability to navigate IPv4 and IPv6, not taking into account intermediate communication methods up until that point. This places an expectancy on the devices to be able to have enough power to use a network stack at some point in its transmission or transportation.

Currently a lot of systems are utilising IPv4, of which the global address space has practically ran out. There is a very slow migration to IPv6 which has a significantly larger amount of address spaces available. However, it may come to pass that a translation occurs between the two and IPv4 is used for the smaller networks. I would hazard to suggest that it may not even be required depending on the data collection mechanism (eg. RFID, bluetooth, etc.)

Presentation / Storage

If we're suggesting an Internet of Things type of world where potentially every object can feed back details of its existence, then that is a lot of information that needs to be stored somewhere. With the example of a parcel delivery firm, say Amazon and their boxes were able to report their status along the entire route of their journey, globally, then that data requires a transportation mechanism that's accessible almost everywhere and for that information to be stored somewhere. A decision would have to be made as to how valuable the data about to be stored is and what it is intended to be used for.

How we view this data is also crucial, it would probably require statistical analysis / processing through a computational system and for ease of use, graphical representation in a way that is easy to understand. At the very least, this would be costly at an enterprise level. For a home user product? depending on the application it would be significantly less. We could suppose that a home user wouldn't need historical data on the state of their belongings or items in the home but it could be sold as a service to do so.

Integrity, Security and Privacy

These are important factors when dealing with confidential data which is also important for safety and protection of its accuracy should always be a consideration. Let's lead with an example:

An elderly lady is wearing a watch that monitors the status of her health, electrocardiography (ECG) signals and how mobile she is. It is customised to the lady and contains a personally identifiable identification number.

Something happens to the lady when she's either traveling or in the home and the watch tries to connect and report that the lady hasn't moved for a long while. The watch attempts to report the current state to a system that can determine if the ECG signals are low and that this is bad and someone should check on the lady.

There are a few areas that could be raised for concern with this Internet of Things scenario (I like lists too, sorry):

• The information reported by the watch is incorrect (or the watch is actually left off the person) and the actions taken to check on the lady are incorrect.
• An occurrence could be where the watch was unable to report to the system, or perhaps the wrong watch reported to the system.
• Someone has intercepted the signal the watch was trying to communicate out, discovers that something has happened to the lady and takes advantage of the situation in a nefarious way
• The device(s) involved in the system are no longer maintained because of succession to the product (end of life) or the company has gone under, because it was not open source there is no-on left to maintain the system and so the issue goes unreported
• Corruption occurs in the system or the system does not perform its calculations properly or it does not have redundancy to handle the information thrown at it during maintenance and the situation is ignored or delayed.

This list could go on, it is not necessarily exhaustive and in many cases it is not entirely new or exclusive to the Internet of Things, but this should be taken as an expression that it is, until a standard is determined that may be any different, the same as current systems in place. Just that the scale of them by means of size and processors they run on are potentially varied.

Should We Do This?

Yes and it helps to be open about it where possible. This helps to maintain systems and with the potential insights monitoring the majority of things can give, it can help to provide insights to bolster the sciences which, I envisage, can provide a positive feedback to help resolve any issues that are observed. Ultimately though, it should provide the feedback that people are often too busy to provide in the form of surveys, interviews and accurate observations.

It should also help to improve storage of data in general and encourage designers to optimise for portability, lower power use, integrity and security of information.