I keep reading article where businesses have created “things” that can be accessed and controlled via the Internet such as the garage door, air conditioner and pot-plant watering systems. But all they’re doing is adding a module to an existing appliance to get a wow response and hope it sells.
What these businesses should be doing is building systems that work in the reverse way. Let’s take the garage door automation. On the one hand we can have a garage door that accepts commands from a smart phone to open and close. But it would be far superior to have a garage door that can access my calendar and phone location to determine when and where i am. And weather or not to open or close.
Let’s take this further. Suppose our car is connected to the Internet. We could start the car from out smart phone or we could have the car check our calendar and location and history (learn from experience – read about deep-learning) and then come to the reasonable conclusion that (at a given time and with the right conditions (variables) the garage door must first be open (a dependency) and then start the engine. We can’t start the engine while the garage door is closed or we might find ourselves ill from fumes.
Internet of things is a money making scheme with little to no benefit to our lives unless we focus on automation. We don’t want to use our smart phone to open an motor-driven door at the shopping center when the door is fully capable of opening as we approach – using motion censors. The same concept should be used when designing Internet connected things. We want things to happen as we need them without our asking/telling. We want the plants in our home to be watered when they need water and not when we remember to command the watering system to do our bidding.
The bottom line is that we want and will expect that “things” will make our lives easier. Taking our smart phone out to tell a dozen appliances to act accordingly is time wasting when those appliances could act in anticipation.