Vikas Mujumdar, February 10, 2020
Applications of new technology are getting very creative, almost Star Trek-esque. I believe that is the right approach to "drinking from the hose pipe" of emerging technology. What I mean is that it is probably better to imagine an application that serves your personal or business needs (to increase your convenience, comfort, safety, physical and mental health, financial health, business value, customer experience and so on) and then to determine which of the emerging technologies need to be used to enable that need.
Far too often I am seeing it being approached the other way around. Hey, we have this new technology known as Blockchain (just a random example), let's see how we can use it. Then, an application is created around it, which may or may not be the need of the hour or even useful or relevant at all. The other point which I have mentioned earlier, is that there is no one technology that is the solution to a problem, it is usually a bunch of technologies interacting with each other.
With this in mind, let's take a look at some emerging applications that can be implemented with the new technologies available, things we could not do earlier, at least not easily and on a wide scale.
Taking a cue from "smart" phones, other aspects of our lives that are implementing emerging technologies are taking on the "smart" prefix. Almost anything qualifies, here's a very long list and it can go on endlessly: Smart Homes, Smart Cities, Smart Factories, Smart Warehouses, Smart Retail, Smart Wearables, Smart Hospitals, Smart Airports, Smart Vehicles, Smart Farms and so on. The other prefix for all of these is "connected". Connected Homes, Connected Factories and you get the drift.
Imagine a home with sensors that read temperature and humidity and turn on or off the air conditioning. Or motion and intrusion detectors that can sound an alarm and turn on lights. Imagine you are not at home and would like to make sure your doors are locked and your lights and ovens are turned off using your mobile app. Or imagine on a hot day you would like to switch on your air conditioning units when you were a few minutes away from home so the house is nice and cool when you enter.
As things get smarter (using technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning which we will talk about shortly), imagine your car determined that you were heading home, noted that it was quite hot and notified your home air conditioner to turn on. Imagine your refrigerator tracked the number of eggs, the volume of milk and juice or the weight of vegetables stored and notified you of the list of groceries to be ordered or even went ahead and placed an order with on online store. By the time you get home, your refrigerator could be pre-stocked for you with ingredients for the dinner you have planned tonight.
From your home, you can get alerts or control your appliances from wherever you are (machine to human communication). Your car can send its data to your maintenance service centres (machine to machine communication) and they can come by to fix any defects they may notice or even do preventive maintenance. Something like this has been available on airplanes for many years now, but they are extremely expensive assets that need to work flawlessly and the expensive technology investments were required.
Imagine traffic lights that can send real-time traffic alerts to drivers to help them optimise their route, reducing congestion and saving fuel. Emergency vehicles may even be provided the ability to send a request to traffic signals directly (without the need for human intervention) to give them a clear path. Utility failures can be detected can reported to the control centre or even directly to the nearest available service person on their smart phones.
Imagine factories that have sensors on machines that read temperature and vibration data and feed it to a manufacturing control system that tweaks the machine operating parameters or shuts down the machine in an emergency. The machines could determine they were due for a maintenance checkup and schedule one with the equipment manufacturer, after checking your production schedule and finding an optimal time that would not impact production.
Imagine if your warehouse determined that a new batch of goods were ready for shipment to a customer and scheduled for a truck to arrive to pick up and deliver the order to the customer. Or sensors tracked incoming raw material and communicated to the manufacturing machines the volume of production they may have to plan for.
Imagine video cameras around the factory floor that track movement of people, vehicles and goods and can direct them to work in a more efficient manner or guide them out of harm's way. Or if determined a security breach and contacted security staff on their mobile phones.
Imagine shelves that place a restocking order as soon as a product stock is close to depletion and does that intelligently, predicting demand based on the buying patterns for the product – no need to order breakfast items if it's nearing lunch time, or making sure school supplies are well stocked in the days running up to schools reopening and then slowing down the restocking, and so on - the possibilities are many.
Imagine you select the products you want and just leave the store. Face recognition systems determine your identity and charge your pre-registered and pre-authorised account seamless and safely.
Imagine watches or wrist bands that read almost all human body parameters (such as your heart rate, blood pressure, blood and transmit vital indicators to a doctor for diagnosis and preventive advice or can advise simple corrective actions such as suggesting intake of water on dehydration.
Imagine shoes that measure your walking or running speed and gait and offer corrective advice or even auto-correct by inflating or deflating parts of the shore to provide optimal support.
Imagine airports with facial recognition systems that allow paperless check in and boarding (by matching the face that checked in) without human intervention. Imagine sensors on bags that allow passengers to track lost or delayed bags. Imagine autonomous baggage handling carts that optimise baggage loading and unloading and minimise damage due manhandling or theft.
You may be right in thinking that many of these applications already exist in some form or manner.
Sensors on appliances and machines have existed for ever now. At home, your air conditioning units, ovens, water heaters, televisions and many other appliances have sensors that measure the ambient or water temperature or light intensity and switch on or off or dim or brighten as required. Your car has sensors that can alert you if a door is open or if you have not fastened your seat belt.
In cities, street lights turn on and off depending on the ambient light and traffic lights can change their patterns based on the traffic flow they detect.
In factories, sensors on machines detect heat and vibrations and feed that data into monitoring and control systems that tweak the machine operating parameters or shuts down the machine in an emergency. Airplanes have thousands of sensors that are continuously feeding the data to its onboard computers and even transmitting them to control towers and maintenance centre for predictive and preventive action.
In hospitals, sensors that measure your vital signs and send readings to a monitor and also alerts to the doctors and nurses if anything is out of the ordinary, have been around for years.
What then is new? Why are these emerging applications? And why do they need new technology?
One reason why all this is being talked about as having a significant impact on our lives is simply because of the increased and more widespread adoption consumer oriented solutions which have been made possible due to the emergence of cheaper and easier to use technology.
The other reason is the wide and deep penetration of network connectivity. Almost every individual in developed and developing countries, is connected to the internet every moment of their lives via a fixed line or a mobile network, at home, at work and while on the move thus creating a whole new world of possibilities in human-machine and machine-machine interactions.
In the past, while it was only in hospitals that you could be connected to sensors to monitor your vital signs, today you can wear smart watches or similar monitoring devices as you go about your life, and readings and alerts will be transmitted to your doctor if required from wherever you are in the world. You can receive a diagnosis and preventive advice immediately and remotely or the monitoring device may advise simple corrective actions such as suggesting an intake of water on dehydration. This can be of immense value to individuals needing continuous monitoring who now do not need to confine themselves to a hospital.
Earlier, data from machines in a factory was only accessible by systems physically in the factory. Now it can be sent to supervisors on their phones wherever they are to enable then to monitor and take action without being around the machine. This is of tremendous value for monitoring machines in locations that pose a health and safety hazard. Feed from video cameras had to be manually observed, now analytics software is cheap and powerful enough that it can be used to take decisions based on the video feed. High bandwidth and fast and plentiful storage space has reduced the constraints on high volume data analytics.
As you can see, in all the above scenarios, there may or may not be any human intervention, not for evaluating and determining the need for a change of state for some other thing nor for actually initiating the change. A thing is doing the evaluation and taking the decision to make the change and is instructing another thing to change, which is accepting the instruction and changing.
The computers are still required to do the processing, the communication lines are still required to transmit data back and forth. But humans are not always required and what were earlier disconnected or passive devices are now capable of processing and communicating, almost like a computer if with less power.
The applications are endless and only limited by your imagination. The technology is available to do almost anything. Some of it is mature and can be used with a high level of confidence and trust, some of it is still nascent and should be used with care and under human supervision.
My previous article offered some insights into what being digital is all about. With the list of possibilities presented in this article and having given our imagination wings, in the next article, let us now begin to understand a little more in depth the magical new technologies that are changing our lives.