Practical IoT: Appliances are Only the Beginning

The Internet of Things is more than just a series of pocketbook-draining home upgrades and fashionably futuristic dog-suits. And, as Ben Rossi at Information Age puts it, more than a connected refrigerator. Specifically, Rossi spells out a number of things that it actually is, each of which helps to paint a more practical picture of the impact IoT is having and will have on the world. For example, Rossi points to IoT as making waves in:

• Homes and offices as a means to deal with issues such as blackouts, water leaks, and circuit overloads
• Wearables as a tool to aggregate and communicate health and fitness information
• Hospitals as a series of interconnected devices to help correlate and centralize patient data
• Factories and warehouses as an array of sensors to help monitor and streamline processes

And even beyond its practical uses, IoT has driven technological progress with some of its requirements. Rossi points to a few of the developments upon which the progress of IoT depends: dynamic application delivery and enhanced load balancers, efficient and reliable handling of large quantities of data, increased consistency and security of service, and more. In other words, as Rossi puts it, IoT is already here in a lot of ways:

The Internet of Things includes the connected refrigerator plus thousands of medical devices in hospitals; smart utility meters; GPS-based location systems; fitness trackers; toll readers; motion detector security cameras; smoke detectors; and embedded systems.

So, if you're interested in the more practical, non-home-automation uses of IoT and what it takes to enable them, check out Rossi's full article, and for a similar look at IoT's impact on the world outside the home, here are another 25 IoT use cases.