Eight Innovative IoT Based Tools That Drive Mobile App Market

By Sachin Nigam, CTO & Co-Founder of Goavega Software India Pvt Ltd

Over the past few years, IOT in India has been gaining huge popularity, with significant application across sectors. The number of IoT devices in the market at the moment is exploding and it’s expected that by 2025, there will be around 22 billion such devices. Factors like access to affordable smart devices, cloud computing, and data-driven integrated service offerings have all contributed to the rise of IoT devices. IOT or Internet of things, connects the world to the Internet to the tangible everyday devices, helping drive efficiency, innovation, and integration, by leveraging AI, ML and other emerging technologies. Listed here are the top 10 IoT innovation trends that are set to drive the mobile app development market in the coming years:

• Home Automation

Smart home automation is becoming the new normal, with increased popularity of features like smart lights, smart doors, smart speakers, and remote monitoring and surveillance of modern homes. While the ‘smart homes’ as a concept is already here, it is still in its nascent stage and shows massive potential for growth in the coming years, especially in the areas of senior citizen care, overall safety and security of homes, remote surveillance, and remote monitoring, all of which is set to be powered and driven by the IOT through smart phone apps.

• IoT in Smart Cities

Even as universal tech adoption is driving smarter personal devices, on the larger scale, state and municipal corporations are also waking up to the enormous benefits of IOT and its applications for building safe, secure, energy-efficient, and sustainable smart cities. From problems like traffic congestion, air and noise pollution, waste management and recycling of resources to helping create a robust 4G and 5G connectivity, that can enable a secure data exchange between private and government agencies, IoT is already finding varied applications across the spectrum.

With a supportive infrastructure, IOT is soon set to be one of the indispensable aspects of modern lifestyle and will bring about a tectonic shift in the way transportation, sanitation, security, and resources are managed, powered by data analytics and IOT

• Edge Computing

Edge Computing is a technology that enables one to transfer the data for an IoT device to another local device, in the vicinity, or at the ‘edge of the network’ instead of sending it to the cloud, from the device. As the number of IOT devices increase, the scope and function of Edge computing is also set to increase, allowing local storage devices to sort, filter, and calculate the data and sending only a small portion of the same to the cloud, reducing traffic to the network and dependency on the cloud.

• Healthcare

Healthcare technology has already witnessed massive transformation over the past two years, driven by the global pandemic and the challenges it brought for the healthcare infrastructure. Adoption of IoT to configure and connect a wide range of medical devices, such as sensors, medical equipment, portable devices, health monitors etc. has opened up a scope for tech automation and robotics in the healthcare sector. In the future, it is set to boost the production of mobile health apps and virtual assistants that will help one to simplify the process of monitoring the health of a patient from a remote location.

• Blockchain for IoT Security

 Innovations in IOT and Blockchain, have shown promising results, with the invention of IOTA, a distributed ledger that can record and execute transactions between IoT devices in the ecosystem. This invention, is set to transform the IoT ecosystem by creating a secure and cost-effective solution that can help reduce the cost of both the SaaS and cloud.

• Data Analytics and Big Data

IoT in combination with AI, is already driving the smart devices surge while helping collect valuable data across the spectrum that can be extremely helpful in gaining consumer insights. The potential of Big Data has already been established and the convergence of IoT and Big Data, is set to create an unprecedented tech advancement that is driven by smart data analytics. From the smallest of household chores like tracking energy consumption, using voice assistance for online shopping, navigation or security to helping generate information that can predict consumer and market trends, IoT powered data analytics is set to not only enhance productivity but will also reduce costs while streamlining operations with the help of large amounts of data.

• Personalization of Retail

IoT has greatly impacted the supply chain management space, as well as the in-store shopping experience of customers, by through the use of sensors, in addition to other techniques. IoT can be used in the future for effective customer engagement, running message broadcasts, sharing important announcements about the store/ collection and assisting with overall process of experiential retail which is set to be the future.

• Security

As the number of devices connected to the internet increases, the risk of data theft and breach of privacy, also increase. While existing concerns around cyber security are already significant, smart IoT devices are now adopting Blockchain, AI, ML, and Big Data to create in-build data security ecosystems that are effective and robust. Once successful, these will help eliminate the cyber security and data privacy threats to a vast extent.

Key Take-Aways

Even as we witness and accelerated adoption of emerging technology among both, businesses and individuals, there is also a rising demand for creating a common framework for IoT devices that can be unified and accessible, across the spectrum. The unified framework design will not only secure the data but the devices with different use cases too. As the IoT space matures over a period of time, newer technologies are expected to come into play, leading to the formation of a robust and well-designed IoT architecture that will be customised for use case scenarios, across fields such as agriculture, finance, insurance, transportation and many others.

And while IoT is still emerging, it holds immense potential and offers a wide range of applications for various industries. IoT in combination with other powerful and innovative technologies can open gates to endless possibilities for every sector and organization irrespective of its size, be it small or big. It’s only a matter of time that it takes over the world, but when it does, make sure that you are ready for it.