Smart Industry 2/2018

Smart Solutions Data
Data
The Secret
sauce of iot
Discussion about the Internet of Things often centers around
sensors and hardware, the additions to our physical environments.
They may be built into street lights and bus stops, or in factories
and on assembly lines – or even inside shipping containers.
But in fact, the ability to connect the dots will be
even more important for the future of IoT.
n By Volker Hirsch
I
n its first wave, the “I” in IoT has
been mainly used to describe
devices that can connect to
other devices: we can now fire
up our central heating from a smartphone
so we won’t freeze when we
come home, we can tell our TV settop
boxes to record the football
game we would miss because of a
business dinner, and we can tell the
postman via a video doorbell where
to leave that parcel. More interestingly,
and in the longer term more
relevant, will be what connectivity
also brings – masses and masses of
data, all nicely time-stamped and
associated with a specific process in
a specific device.
Deeper insights
In short, machines, robots, and sensors
have become data nodes and
the true opportunities can now
be unleashed. Few important use
cases would be possible without
meaningful processing of data and
increasingly this involves artificially
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