Prescient IoT — 5 instances in which AI and IoT makes the perfect duo of the century
Where are we today as an collective human race?
This is not a question to the reader, as each may have their own opinion regarding this, but to a person like me who majorly dedicates his life to the technical field of IoT the answer is
“We are at the forefront of making machines smarter than humans, where creations will become exceptionally better than their creators”
Now do not let your mind drift to the negative aspect of this scenario which points directly to those memories influenced by the generations most favorite action sagas like Terminator , I-Robot , so on and so-forth which all showcase how smart machines will try and overthrow humans from existence.
Instead let me try to bring your focus on how a world of connected devices , apart from making machines smarter than they ever were in the past, will help humans better manage our resources, economies, the environment and at its minimal ourselves, more efficiently with a higher throughput than we were able to before this revolution took place.
Let me just explain in brief how this revolution will be brought forth, and why the time now is just right for it to take place.
The major shift that invoked the beginning of this revolution is the advancement in wireless technology. With the 4G speeds available for data communication and WiFi being made available by governments of many countries in not just households and office spaces , but on streets, railway stations , airports etc. connecting devices to the internet has become increasingly easier.
The second most important factor that is the brains(literally ) in this eco-system is AI and machine learning algorithms deployed on advanced state-of-the-art of computing machines (commonly called the cloud) in combination with access to the terabytes of data (2.5 Quintilian bytes of digital data generated per day today) present in various database systems, gives the machines a large enough data-set to be able to find patterns which may never have been known to mankind and even help them predict future events with a very high accuracy.
And lastly the physical machines that will produce this data (the body of the AI mind). With more and more devices being connected to the Internet with inexpensive platforms (such as our Bolt which makes rapid development and deployment of IoT enabled devices as easy for 5th grader to build) are ensuring that a multitude of sensors can now monitor various factors that shape and influence the world around us.
With this understanding , we can now look into some interesting and intriguing cases which support my claim that IoT and AI make the winning combination that will lead the next big technological revolution in human history.
Energy Sector: With ever increasing population , the fuel consumption required to keep cities running is growing in epic proportions. With IoT enabled smart energy meters and AI, power companies can selectively supply, limit or restrict power to certain areas where the AI has predicted and calculated the requirements based on usage patterns of the end consumer.
Farming: Every year the demand on world’s food resources keeps getting higher , to cope up with these trends traditional farming methods will eventually fall short. To cope up with the demand, and considering the land available for farming , Hydroponics looks to be the way ahead. Now think of these Hydroponics setup with a range of sensors that monitor temperature, moisture, CO2, air current, lighting, fertiliser flow, and the pH of the soil. The data collected from the sensor can be fed to an AI which can take care of all the operations in the Setup with minimum human interaction. This ensures better crop yield and crop health as the conditions for growth are controlled and monitored 24/7 by an machine whose error rate is extremely low.
Healthcare: Today most of the educated section of the society end up with white collar jobs, which mostly involve being glued to a seat in the larger section of a day and with minimal physical activity in whats left in the busy-schedule of these individual. To add to this pollution levels in most metropolitan cities are at an all time high. This is an cumulative effect that causes various health issues. IoT and AI can help alleviate these issues. An example would be having a non-intrusive / wearable sensors which continuously monitor vital stats such as heart-rate, blood pressure, etc. When this data is collected by AI , the machines can even predict an heart attack before it happens and alert medical staff to attend to the individual preemptively. In other cases it can also alert individuals of the activity required to undertake or diet to be maintained to avoid developing any severe health conditions in case it incurs after monitoring the lifestyle of said individual patterns that lead to severe health conditions.
Logistics: Technology is now finding its place in a an industry that even till date continues to work with manual data entries and in some cases even age old book-keeping practices , to keep goods and services moving from one place to another. Although this is a well-oiled machine, the work done by humans in this process is mostly mechanical and can easily be done more effectively by smart machines. If companies adopt GSM\GPS based IoT platforms into their transport vehicles or High value goods containers, a single individual can sit behind a desk and keep track of all the deliveries being carried out. AI can manage resources better improving overall efficiency and thus profits for such businesses. AI can also identify flaws and unnecessary or redundant processes in the well-oiled but prone to human errors sector i.e. the Logistics industry.
FMCG: Modern supermarkets will move towards having IoT on their product shelves. Once the data is constant and consistent, the ML algorithms would be able to predict which products are going to sell faster based on say, weather outside, past purchase trends etc. That way stores never run out of fast selling items. Also the manufactures will be able to see client trends , such as how much time the consumer spends in aisles dedicated to their products vs their competitor and ML can predict how to convert footfall into sales by finding various patterns which help improve sales.
We, at Inventrom, have developed the most affordable IoT platform, called the Bolt IoT Platform, and are making it better-n-better everyday in order to offer versatile features to developers & enterprises to make products which will be advantageous in all the sectors mentioned above and many more. You can now pre order the platform on Kickstarter — https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/boltiot/the-worlds-first-9-iot-platform?ref=9ci3sr
