Benefits for users
Applications based on these smart technologies offer huge benefits to end users such as automating tasks and making Things remotely controllable and monitorable.
The IoT and IIoT improve our efficiency by letting IoT applications optimize the usage of resources and allowing us to reduce costs. They also enhance our safety and security, because IoT devices can provide real-time monitoring and alerts.
Data collection and analysis by IoT nodes can be used to personalize our experiences and the augmented connectivity provided by IoT solutions creates new possibilities for communication and collaboration.
Finally, the IoT and IIoT enable new and modern business models, as we’ll see in the next section.
You may ask why all this is happening now and if it comes without a cost.
The history of the IoT can be traced back to the 1980s when the term was first used by British technology pioneer Kevin Ashton in a presentation about the potential for interconnected devices.
In the early 2000s, the development of wireless networking standards such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi made it easier to connect devices to the internet and cellular connectivity became a consumer market.
Ten years later, major technology companies, such as Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, began to invest in IoT cloud platforms.
Today, after 40 years, the progress of software technology has made big data, data analytics tools, and cloud platforms accessible and affordable for most people. The internet is a predominant medium of communication and the decreased cost of electronics, together with ecosystems such as Arduino, has made the technology easy to use.
The IoT indirectly brings costs to businesses of every size because they need to seize the moment, adopt these technologies, and keep up with progress to remain competitive in the market.
The social impact of the IoT is related to the introduction of different behaviors and the risk of human beings losing some manual and practical capabilities. For example, people who used to travel by car before navigation applications were available on mobile phones had a certain sense of orientation; nowadays, this skill has almost disappeared.
The IIoT introduces the risk of misleading managers to think that these technologies support cost savings by reducing the workforce because everything is automated. Actually, the personnel need training to maintain, troubleshoot, and improve the new systems, and it’s important that business managers understand this.
In the end, it is the responsibility of everyone involved in an IoT project to consider the application and manage the social effects properly. It means that it’s also your responsibility, dear reader.
