Appliances with smart science

Thanks to the Internet of Things, smart households are moving closer to reality, with fridges that know when you’re low on milk and self-monitoring utility systems. Compatability, however, remains an issue that needs addressing.

The OpenAir I1.3 infotainment system on display in a car at the International CES in Las Vegas. The technology allows you to to access your smartphone and its apps from the touch screen in your car. JShow more

Imagine a world where your fridge orders your groceries for you, your electricity meter advises you to stop using the tumble dryer so much, and your car automatically turns on your home’s air conditioning before you park.

Such futuristic visions are increasingly becoming a reality thanks to the growth of what is known as the Internet of Things. This was one of the hot topics at last week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where an increasing number of consumer and industrial devices talk to one another and share data over the internet.

Depending on your perspective, the growth of the Internet of Things (or IoT for short) either offers a better, easier home and work life, or presents technology companies with yet more opportunities to share information about ever more obscure details of our daily lives.

If the likes of Samsung and LG are to be believed, fridges that know when you’ve run out of milk and washing machines that can be activated remotely by mobile phone will soon become a feature of our daily lives. But while the enabling of IoT has come on leaps and bounds in recent years, several challenges remain to making it a reality, if customers can be persuaded to buy into the vision in the first place.

The Internet of Things and dreams of a smart connected life have been pitched to consumers for decades, but are now closer to reality than ever before.

In particular the evolution of companies' core IT infrastructure from a central server-based approach to a more cloud-based approach, together with the dramatic take-up of smartphones have been key to the resurgence of interest in the IoT, according to Anurag Gupta, a research manager specialising in healthcare and government markets at the IT consultants Gartner.

“The increased proliferation of mobile technology, and especially the amount of heavy lifting taken on by the cloud has been key for Internet of Things,” he says. “At the same time the cost of technology is falling, meaning it’s cheaper and faster to do a lot of number-crunching. So there’s a big push from the supply side.”

Much of the demand thus far for the IoT has come from utilities providers and manufacturing companies, according to Mr Gupta, a trend that is forecast to continue to 2020. Here in the UAE, the utilities providers Adwea and Dewa have been among the earliest standard bearers for the IoT, in line with various smart city initiatives announced by government authorities in Abu Dhabi and Dubai.

Adwea began rolling out smart electricity and water meters as early as 2011, while Dewa announced plans in November 2013 to install 250,000 smart electricity and water meters by the end of 2018.

While no figures were available for the number of smart meters installed by Adwea, Dewa is reported to have installed more than 150,000 such devices to date.

Yet an earlier example of the IoT in Dubai is the Roads and Transport Authority’s Salik service, introduced in 2007, which uses RFID tags to monitor and charge for driving on Sheikh Zayed Road.

Globally, the manufacturing industry is increasingly embracing the potential of the IoT to increase efficiencies and boost safety.

Mr Gupta cited the examples of GE, which can track the performance of its airplane engines (and track potential faults) in real time, enabling better fuel efficiency and potentially saving lives, and the mining giant Rio Tinto, which has used a vast array of sensors to increasingly automate the mining process and improve safety.

If the likes of Samsung are to be believed, such data-gathering sensors will increasingly become the norms in our homes and our cars as well. In August the Korean company acquired SmartThings, an open platform for smart home devices.

This acquisition came six months after Google spent US$3.2 billion on acquiring Nest Labs, maker of smart thermostats, smoke and carbon monoxide detectors, signalling a new push into the smart home market.

In his keynote CES address last week, the Samsung chief executive B K Yoon said that 90 per cent of all Samsung products, including all of its televisions, tablets and mobile phones, will be IoT devices by 2017. This will extend to every piece of hardware that Samsung produces – be it fridges, washing machines, or tumble dryers – by 2020, he said.

Despite such high-profile announcements, there are two broad reasons to believe that the IoT is not likely to make an impact in our homes for a while to come.

The first obstacle to the take-off of IoT in the home is to get the devices to interact with one another in a user-friendly way. In particular, there is no current standard that enables devices from competing manufacturers to share data with one another in a meaningful way, according to the industry analysts Ovum.

“Many devices are unable to communicate with one another, meaning that users are potentially buying into multiple ecosystems to control appliances or functions such as lighting, heating, and cooling,” the company wrote in a recent research note.

In other words, if you’re desperate to have your washing machine and fridge to talk to your Samsung Galaxy phone, chances are both appliances will need to be manufactured by Samsung.

“A number of stakeholders, including retailers such as Staples and chipset manufacturers such as Qualcomm and Intel, are working to address this problem by releasing products or standards that can communicate across multiple protocols, or that can tie together connected devices from different manufacturers,” says Ovum. But the analysts caution that true interconnectivity is still some way off.

In the interconnected world of the IoT, who interfaces with the consumer when things go wrong is key, says Mr Gupta.

“Say you have a connected home built by one company, a Google Nest thermostat, a Mercedes-Benz car and a Fitbit device that are all talking to one another. If anything goes wrong in this chain, which company is ultimately responsible?”

Also, despite the hype from manufacturers and tech companies, it still remains unclear as to whether customers actually know or care about what the IoT can offer them to persuade them to hand over their cash.

While Mr Gupta notes that the likes of BMW have enjoyed some success with cars kitted out with sensors to improve safety and offer a smoother drive, IoT has so far yet to find a compelling application for the consumer market.

“Right now, [the IoT] is a hammer looking for a nail,” says Mr Gupta. “The technology offers plenty of solutions, but everyone’s still looking for the right problem to solve to drive take- up. No one has a clear understanding of the business model yet, how you actually make money from all this. Do people truly understand what customers’ needs are enough to convince them something is worth spending money on?”

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