Ever thought one ‘thing’ would change your life forever? Well, what about an entire Internet of ‘Things’? IoT, for short, is a term given to all those cool new gadgets that connect to your Wifi network or your phone — things like your Fitbit, or Nest thermostat. Basically, anything that can receive an IP address and be connected to the web is now a ‘thing’.
Now think bigger and colder — your fridge. Imagine a few years from now when the quality of your fridge isn’t determined by how cold it keeps your food, but actually by the quality of the algorithm that works out what food to order. While connected fridges are slowly becoming a reality, it will probably take a while before you’ve got a kitchen full of appliances that chat to each other. Why, you ask? It’s simple — we don’t change our fridges and toasters often enough for our kitchens to be fully connected overnight. So, as cool as it would be to have a fridge that orders your shopping for you — you might need to wait a bit. In the meantime, there are some other exciting uses for IoT.
What’s already here
If you’re excited about IoT and would like to have a proper play with one of those ‘things’ right here, right now, smart TVs and thermostats could temporarily satisfy your appetite, and both are readily available. Smart TV allows you to connect to the Internet, and watch your favourite movies from Netflix on a big screen.
Smart thermostats give you the option of remotely controlling the heating and A/C in your house. Meaning that you can cool down or heat up your house before you even get home. So instead of walking into a freezing cold house after a long day at work — you can switch on the heating from the office and enjoy a toasty warm welcome. Or switch it off if you suddenly get called away for a few days. Sounds lush, doesn’t it? It’s also a great way to be more energy efficient — saving the world and your wallet.
Smart cities and smart cars
If I said ‘Smart Car’ you might picture one of those peculiar little cars without a boot. Think again. Smart cars now refers to a modern era of automotives that will gradually become self-driving cars — on steroids. Fully autonomous vehicles are likely to hit the mass market by the end of this decade. They’ll not only get us from point A to point B without requiring any effort from us, they’ll also remind us about our dry cleaning (while organising a route that allows us to pick it up on the way home) or take us to our favourite cafe on our way to work if we didn’t get enough sleep last night. So while the idea of a car organising our life is a tiny bit scary, it could certainly make our mornings a whole lot easier. Smart cities, in turn, could use their intelligence to analyse vast amounts of data and improve the efficiency of the energy usage (e.g. by turning the street lights on at exactly the right time), control traffic and public transport, making the cities less polluted, saving money and its citizens’ time, for example by letting you know where you can find a free parking spot, which saves you driving around the area in circles for 20 minutes.
Shopping made easier
No, I’m not going to talk about a connected fridge ordering your groceries for you again. Instead, I will bring you to the supermarket of the future. A supermarket where employees don’t have to check the shelves all the time to see if they are out of a popular product — the highly integrated system would tell them the shelf is empty, and they need to restock quickly. It’d also allow you, the customer, to find out via an app whether or not your favourite item is in stock. I’m sure you were annoyed at least once when your perfectly planned shopping list fell apart because the store was out of the key ingredient. My local supermarket is always out of my favourite yoghurt, it seems, and if I knew in advance, I’d get it on my way home from a different place. With the future supermarket, that will be possible. It will also have no cash registers. No more queueing!
But your clothes shopping experience could also be improved. Every person who ever shopped in Primark on a weekend can attest that trying on clothes can be a really time-consuming and irritating process. The mirrors of tomorrow will take that burden off your shoulders and make shopping an enjoyable experience. Those mirrors (and they actually already exist) show you what you will look like in various clothes without the need to take anything off, and wasting time on things that you’re going to look bad in.
So whilst IoT is still very much in its infancy, it won’t be like that for much longer. I for one am excited about the possibilities of how it can improve our lives in so many different ways. Because who wouldn’t want an extra half an hour of sleep on their way to work? I certainly would.
But to work, all of those devices need data. Your data. We want you to be able to control who has access to it and what they do with it. Download the people.io app and start regaining control of your data.
