IIoT – Ireland Internet of Things. A history of IoT and what it means for Ireland

By Beth Flanagan, CTO and Founder, Togán Labs.

In this series of articles, Beth looks at some of the fundamentals of IoT from the standpoint of a developer who has been working in the field long before this term existed. She explores how some of IoT hype might differ from reality and then moves on to take a look at where the real innovation is happening and what IoT really means for Ireland?

Everyone loves a technological revolution, they are edgy and exciting. They leave people in feverish anticipation of change. But what, fundamentally, is the Internet of Things? Is it a hype bubble or really a revolution?

Many of our team at Togán Labs have been embedding programmable compute technology into new devices for decades: making them smarter, connecting them together and enabling increased levels of intelligent automation. Take the telephone or TV, both of which are unrecognisable from the way we used these devices just a ten or fifteen years ago.

In this sense, we are in the middle of a slow technology evolution, rather than a revolution.

If anything, IoT has been built on a revolution in cost more than sudden technological advancement. The intel 4004 is generally regarded as the first microcontroller, back in 1971 it cost the equivalent of just over €330 in today’s money. But today, a bulk buyer can get a hold of a fully programmable microprocessor board (effectively a small computer) for around one Euro.

This price shift, on its own, has revolutionised the entire economics of industrial and consumer electronics beyond recognition. For an increasing majority of devices with even the most basic functionality, it is cheaper to include and program a small, multi-purpose microprocessor, than it is to design and build an old-school electronic circuit board.

And once you have what is effectively a small computer in your device, why not program-in more intelligence. Or, for an extra Euro or two in hardware costs, why not connect it to the Internet using Wifi or another lower-powered wireless network.

Insight into the underlying economics shows how IoT is no longer about imagining what incremental changes are possible ‘if’ we give a device intelligence and connectivity. Significant compute power and the possibility for network connectivity is now being baked-in to nearly every device. So IoT is increasingly about, given that most devices are intelligent and connected,  how do we as a society use this?

This next phase of IoT is almost more philosophical than technical. It is about how we can completely reimagine what the devices in all areas of our lives actually are, what they do, and what they mean to us? It is on a par with, if not significantly greater than, the industrial revolution.

Where we were once looking at what we can mechanise with a device, we are now looking at: what sensors can we add; what information does this give us; how can we monitor and analyse this is a meaningful way, how can we share and combine this data with other sources of information; and with all this insight, how can we give our original device automated, intelligent behaviour?

So yes, IoT does mean self-driving automobiles. But before we get there, it means a whole heap of other, perhaps less headline-grabbing, but probably more profound changes.

Just sticking with cars in the here-and-now, it means a satnav that connects to your calendar and warns attendees if traffic makes you late for an appointment. In terms of what is in the immediate future, it means and engine management system connected to advanced analytics in a remote data centre. This, in turn, means cars that can diagnose problems, book a service and a courtesy car, even before a breakdown.

Take the healthcare market, set to reach USD $10.059 trillion by 2022 according to the 2019 Deloitte Global Healthcare Outlook. What provides a stronger draw for our growing disposable income, than the human desire to live longer?

We already have smartwatches, fitness trackers and smartphone apps which track and monitor our vital signs and help us improve our fitness, sleep and mental health. Most estimates put the size of this market at around $35bn back in 2017-18. But with varying growth predictions, this one category of IoT devices may be worth as much as $165bn within the next three years. We can see that before long it won’t just be the car; smart medical devices speeding the diagnosis of our medical problems and booking us in for a preemptive service!

Another area where we are already seeing rapid change through IoT and automation is in agri-tech. Dublin-based Research and Markets predicts the global market for IoT in agriculture to reach $28.65 Billion by 2023, and this is an area where many Irish firms are already leading the way.

In its current phase of development, IoT is very much about vision, imagination and yes, (overused buzzword alert) innovation. But it is about disruptive innovation that combines in-depth, practical, knowledge of a subject area, with an ability to reimagine how things could be. As with most major technological advances, it is about revolutionising how we do things with technology we already have.

In the next article in this series, we will go on to look at the role of open source technology in IoT and look at how this opens up start-up, entrepreneurial opportunities on a scale we may never have seen before.

Beth ‘pidge’ Flanagan is the former release manager of the Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded at Intel’s Open Source Technologies Center. She is a well known open-source software developer, project maintainer and a respected contributor to the OpenEmbedded, the Yocto Project and Oryx Linux (among many others).

Based outside of a small village in the rural west of Ireland, Beth now runs Togán Labs, a proudly Irish start-up developing some of the core technologies which underpin the Internet of Things (IoT) and Industry 4.0 (or ‘Embedded Device Manufacture’ as it was known when she started out!)