How many times have you heard the 3 letters, IoT? Do you know what IoT means? Simply put, it is the “Internet of Things”, and it’s amazing how many things, make up the IoT!
What is IoT?
The Internet of things (IoT) is the network of physical devices, vehicles, home appliances, and other items embedded with electronics, software, sensors, actuators, and network connectivity which enable these objects to connect and exchange data. Each thing is uniquely identifiable through its embedded computing system but is able to inter-operate within the existing Internet infrastructure. Experts estimate that the IoT will consist of about 30 billion objects by 2020.
Examples of IoT Devices
A few examples of devices are: Alexa, Amazon Echo, smart phones, intelligent devices, light controlled devices, medical devices, and more. Think about what you have in your home that is connected to the internet through you wireless network. Security camera’s? CPAP machine? Amazon devices?
“Things”, in the IoT sense, can refer to a wide variety of devices such as heart monitoring implants, biochip transponders on farm animals, cameras streaming live feeds of wild animals in coastal waters, automobiles with built-in sensors, DNA analysis devices for environmental/food/pathogen monitoring, or field operation devices that assist firefighters in search and rescue operations. Legal scholars suggest regarding “things” as an “inextricable mixture of hardware, software, data and service”.
These devices collect useful data with the help of various existing technologies and then autonomously flow the data between other devices.
The term “the Internet of things” was coined by Kevin Ashton of Procter & Gamble, later MIT‘s Auto-ID Center, in 1999.
