Smart Things

The Information Age with it’s plethora of digital products is now at a point where IOT is supposed to make everything smart. Umm, what is smart?
When we talk about a person being smart, what we generally refer to is one’s personal appearance or his quick wit, the ability to react fast with an impressive response.

Just going digital doesn’t ensure smartness in a system. In the real world everything is interconnected. Each individual object has it’s own function and life cycle. Everything comes together to provide us with the experience of being somewhere or using something. So, what changes when an object becomes smart?

Let’s take the example of the smartwatch. A watch sits strapped to our wrist and tells us the current time. A smartwatch on the other hand tells the time and is a tiny computer in itself, equipped with a set of sensors, making it an extension of our smartphones. With rapid technovation we started to expand the capabilities of our phones. We put in an assortment of sensors to collect data. We have a set of services designed to analyze and respond to the data, with or without our intervention. With the implementation of AI and ML in digital services, the services themselves are adapting to our behavior. Is that smart enough?

A smart object effectively monitors, analyses, responds and adapts to the changes in a system. How these things happen is what we are constantly working on, improving the system, optimizing, trying to make it more versatile, aiming for an organic experience.

What is a smart city then? Does the underlying principles still remain the same? A city is made up of the union of two major things. A geographical region and people. These two things come together and we start manipulating our surroundings along different channels. That gives rise to different levels of interaction, in the forms of : agriculture, infrastructure, technology, culture and economy.

In the Indian context, how do we make a city or any other place smart for that matter. The requirements include a basic framework that will involve interconnecting different systems and the ability to adapt and react to the people and problems of that place.

Much of India that we dream of still lies ahead of us: housing, power, water and sanitation for all; bank accounts and insurance for every citizen; connected and prosperous villages; and, smart and sustainable cities.

Narendra Modi