The most popular and comprehensive Open Source ECM platform
Let us know more
Internet of Living Things (IoLT): Wiring Up People and Pets to the Internet
The idea of the Internet of Things (IoT) is that everything can be wired up with sensors to transmit data, and communicate and respond via a connection over the internet. Typical examples of devices that can be enabled for IoT include mobile smartphones, industrial devices, smart meters, appliances like refrigerators and toasters, and infrastructure elements like lighting and heating.
But IoT needn’t be limited to inanimate objects. Advances in miniaturization and wireless communication are now making it possible to also wire up both animals and people with sensors. Trackers now easily allow you to track the location of a pet or animal — in India herders are tracking the location of their cows, for example.
More accurate monitoring and tracking of people with chronic disease is another such possible application. Or being able to monitor healthy people but be able to identify precursors to possible problems well before the person becomes symptomatic.
Clive Brown, CTO of Oxford Nanopore Technologies, for example, told PharmaTimes that devices to monitor health will become increasingly common. “Think about a device performing a real time inventory of living systems, perhaps blood, food production lines, ecosystems etc. This is designed to stream to cloud based analysis services and thence tracked both over time, by location and other related data. The biological state of anything, then, becomes an extension of the internet. Analytics based on such stateful data streams can provide a new layer of intelligence about natural systems.”
Collecting more information means that we’d be able to learn more too. Hagen Finley wrote for O’Reilly Radar that “Even if 10% of the world’s population were to don sensors and anonymously share that data with research institutions, that would represent an exponential increase in the available data for research. While it’s nice to employ statistics to discover some hidden cause of jet engine failure using longitudinal studies, the possibility that the sensor data you shared would lead to a treatment of a disease that’s threatening to kill your child has the potential to be life changing. The IoLT addresses challenges about which we deeply care.”
