The Future of Technology

The Internet of Things, 5G connectivity, and Automatic Driver Assistance Systems
 

Just as the internet revolutionized humanity over the last twenty years, making information available at the tip of one’s finger, today we stand at the threshold of yet another revolution – the Internet of Things (IoT). The IoT revolution pivots around the principle that anything that can be connected, will be connected. It relies on the increasing “smartness” of devices and appliances – smartphones, smart televisions, smart cars, and smart watches, to name a few. A gadget is said to be smart when it has the ability to sense and process information, and possibly exchange information with other devices, and in some cases, take intelligent decisions, and trigger specific actions based on information analysis.

The government is envisioning smart cities, where there would be sensors distributed across the city to collect various information, to be transmitted to aggregators and processing nodes, and a certain action implemented thereupon. For example, traffic sensors at a certain street can proactively alert potential incoming vehicles from other streets, and recommend drivers to take detours to avoid delays due to expected traffic snarls, or in the extreme case, force a smart car to automatically steer into another lane! Does it sound like science fiction? Well, it will be plausible soon, just as today’s possibility of watching your favorite video anywhere anytime on a handheld device, would sound a distant dream two decades ago.

How convenient and efficient it would be for everyone in the streets if the IoT system could help in counting pedestrians on the footpath and cars in the street to synchronize traffic lights, so that neither cars nor humans have to wait unnecessarily just because the traffic signal lights have been programmed to wait for a fixed duration. This is reasonably plausible; smart lighting, for example, is already in use in hotels and offices, wherein some lights turn on only when they detect human activity. Tomorrow’s offices, buildings and homes will be increasingly smart, not only for efficiency, but also for energy conservation for ecological reasons.

The electronics industry is envisaging smart buildings, smart homes and smart industries of the future that will extensively leverage the IoT infrastructure. The world will become a cobweb of smart devices, interconnected with one another, sensing, processing and taking intelligent decisions on the go, delivering productivity and efficiency for the larger benefit of humanity. The smartphones that are the most widely used connected devices today, would serve as crucial components of this network, and remain as handheld user interfaces of choice, along with smart wearable devices such as smart watches.

The 5G mobile broadband technology that is being developed today, shall connect various Internet-enabled devices, and emerge as the connectivity backbone of the future IoT infrastructure. 5G that is expected to be commercialized by 2020, will transcend smartphones, and harness multitude of intelligent devices embedded in gadgets and mundane objects, enabling them to capture, send and receive information.

The sensors on the IoT network could be of different types, such as temperature sensors, humidity sensors, motion and speed sensors, voltage sensors, and various Micro electromechanical sensors (MEMS) etc., and a combination of these sensors would render powerful sensory capabilities to the IoT infrastructure. The sensors can pick up vital information about any entity, whether a human body, or an agricultural farm, aggregate and process such information into insights that a human can use to take meaningful decisions, or directly interpret information to actuate meaningful tasks. For example, imagine a doctor in an advanced hospital in a metropolitan city, dynamically monitoring heartbeat and blood sugar levels of a patient situated in a remote town over the IoT network, and prescribing medication to the patient through email. Imagine a farmer monitoring soil conditions (humidity, fertility etc.) from the comfort of his home, and actuating water and fertilizer dissemination remotely using his smartphone, at any hour. It will bring unprecedented productivity into human lives.

Smartness won’t be limited only to gadgets. It will also pervade the automotive space. Cars will become more and more automated, at the minimum, being able to render active cruise control, automatic braking and provide lane keeping assistance. More sophisticated ones will be able to render adaptive cruise control, lane centering, automatic parking, and highway autopilot. The ultimate vision of the automotive industry is to enable a fully automatic vehicle – the so called driverless or self-driving car. Such “intelligent” vehicles will rely on complex sensory capabilities leveraging camera based, RADAR based, Ultrasonic and Laser based sensor solutions, some of which have been industrialized, and others being still under research and development. The cars of tomorrow would leverage sensor fusion (mix of several sensors), and advanced computing technologies, to take intelligent decisions on its own, on the fly.

Like any other technology, IoT will also have associated challenges to be addressed. While cyber security is already a major concern for today’s internet users, the vulnerability to security threats will be all the more pronounced in the IoT context. Protection from hackers, and maintaining high data security standards, will be the cornerstone of success for IoT applications. But every challenge in itself throws up an opportunity for humanity to exercise more creativity and innovation. Designing secure IoT systems, for example, shall be a major area of innovation. Another challenge will pertain to the need to handle humungous amount of data (Big Data), and make sense out of such data. This throws up tremendous opportunities for data analytics professionals, and demand for hyper scale data centres.

It is forecasted that over 50 billion “things” will get connected through IoT in the coming decade. No wonder, the IoT technology market revenue is expected to grow at a cumulative annual growth rate (CAGR) of over 30%, generating hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue over the next years, globally. This is bound to create high demand for jobs in the field of electronics engineering, computer science, information technology, data analytics, embedded software, software applications and services. It is an excellent time to be a young professional, joining or about to join the workforce, as the next two to three decades shall be a period of high growth and penetration for IoT, ADAS and 5G technologies.

(pubished in print, courtesy the Assam Tribune, 16th June, 2017)