Your TV knows who is sitting in front of it. Your light bulbs know when someone’s in the room. Your sleep monitor knows when you’re dreaming. Your car is navigating you through the shortest and cleanest path to your office. And chances are it’s going to be a while before your “smart” fridge can send cooking instructions to the blender. Magical..!!! Isn’t it??? I am a bit fantasizing as of now. But is it easy to do this magic, especially in India?
IoT will dynamically change the way we connect and communicate with people and things around us. Right from smart homes and smart cities to providing automated solutions for energy management, healthcare, manufacturing and enterprises, IoT is impacting every sphere of life.
The business of IoT is already booming in developed countries like US, in Europe like France, Spain etc. But in India the facts might be misleading by having said that the market scope of India is USD 56.7 billion by 2020. Being reason, this market number includes all services like apps, analytics, IT hardware, sensors, IoT devices, communications, data center and mostly are in its pilot project developing phase.
The iot industry in India is expected to take off by 2018 to meet industrial demands but there are several roadblocks in its journey to reach from a prototype by hobbyists to product in industry.
1. Awareness
The biggest hindrance from the end user companies will be the justification of IoT investments. They need to have a strong business case on how IoT will help their company maybe cost reduction, increase productivity, improving sales, finding new customers, improving customer satisfaction or what.
If we talk about wearable IOT devices, while the Wearables have become mainstream in the US, in India initially there awareness is low since none of the international brands are here. But the launch of products like apple watch and wearable fitness gadgets have multifold increased the consumer acceptance.
2. Powering these devices
Providing energy to the devices is a big concern that is creating a situation for smart and small integrated devices. In recent years, multiple applications, involving networks of a relatively large number of wireless nodes, have been considered. Each node would perform sensing, data processing and wireless transmission of information. Consequently, these nodes need to be self‐powered, many of the advantages of wireless sensor networking being likely to be lost if external (i.e wired) power sources were used.
Unfortunately improvements in energy capacity have been much slower than in other areas such as the performance of integrated circuits. As a consequence the percentage in size and weight devoted to the battery in a miniaturized device has dramatically increased.
Many big companies and research institutes are now investing moderate capital and brain power to resolve this issue but we are still away from what is required.
3. Connectivity
When it’s all about devices and things, what can be the most important challenge other than connectivity itself. The need to have really robust connectivity is indispensable. Billions of newly evolved IoT devices will need billions of IP addresses too.
This will lead to need for developing new IP protocols. And if we are talking about India, then we have a serious issue with fast Internet connectivity. In many countries where consumers have adopted 4G , we have still not got over fully with slow 2Gs.
4. Integration
Suppose you are an IOT consumer, there shall be different IOT services you might be enjoying. While doing so you will observe that you shall be using one application dedicated to your fitness, one application of home automation, you might be using an application for your office management, your car etc. This means either your smart phone is going to have huge memory shortage or it has already gone.
IOT has a lot more to serve; one dedicated application for only one service is not going to help at all. There will be billions of connected devices in near future. The challenge is to create a single application to control everything, with an architecture that provides whatever the developer needs, from the infrastructure to an open development platform that allows IoT connectivity across millions of devices.
At last, even after all these hurdles before this astonishing concept to become a reality at consumer level, the stupendous efforts are being made by the developers, hobbyists, etc. companies to make this happen.
It is giving an opportunity to innovators of our country to become entrepreneurs. let us see now how early this going to be happened….
