Cognition will unleash the true power of IoT

Although the reports of high-tech innovations are making headlines in the Internet of Things (IoT), but due to its slow development and limited commercialization, some industry sentinels have started calling it the “Internet of NoThings”. Although the immense possibilities of IoT are shrouded in the clouds right now, but as it is said that every cloud has a silver lining, Prakash Arunachalam, Senior Vice President, at VirtusaPolaris also believes that the future holds good for IoT even if the present looks tough.

The missing piece:

The main reason is that IoT is not the transformative disruption at this moment as a lot of sentinels imagine – there are too many missing pieces that industry needs to work on.

Devices and sensors capturing the data and algorithms, to handle the front and back ends of the IoT is taking too much of importance. The middle fragment of infrastructural gaps that lies between the sensors in things and the data analysis performed by servers in the cloud at the centre is not getting much attention that it seeks. These less focused middleware issues of standards, interoperability, integration and data management – especially privacy and protection from malicious attacks along with product liability, intellectual property rights and regulatory compliance are going to take a long time.

But all these hurdles are now falling quickly and the industry is rapidly adapting to this disruptive innovation.

Security, privacy, and reliability concerns:

The Internet went through a similar phase two decades ago. It is still not fully secure, so we can’t expect IoT to be secure either. However, security in the IoT is constantly evolving to meet new challenges within and its subsequent connected technologies.

As technology is always advancing, new manufacturing processes generally result in faster and more efficient processors, which sooner or later fill the gap, thus providing developers with enough processing power to implement better security features.

Going forward, IoT companies will also need to build secured IoT devices by adopting a security focused approach, increase the transparency, ensure the privacy and provide consumers with a choice to opt out of data collection.

Factors changing the future of IoT:

IoT will deliver to its consumer the experiences that were not possible couple of years ago. These new experiences will not only deliver customer value but will awe and delight them as well. Products that tap into these human emotions leading them towards cognitive robotics will become the corner stones of tomorrow’s connected reality.

We need the IoT to be smarter than it is, creating value by connecting physical devices and sensors, to analyze the data in order to understand its patterns and trends. These data driven decisions will have the potential to drive businesses and industries to new heights. Using cognitive computing systems that learn at scale, reason purposefully and interact naturally with humans, we can begin exploiting IoT data to an unprecedented degree thus get even more value from the data it produces.

Currently much of the residual data created by IoT is not used but holds great value. The source of these residual data may be anything from video and image analytics, natural language processing (NLP), machine learning, text analytics, etc. By bringing cognition to the IoT i.e. by combining data from devices with information from other sources such as social data, weather and news events, we can use the resulting analysis to drive decisions from predictive maintenance to everything.

Benefits that the companies will be able to harness from IoT in the near future:

Companies need to identify initial business areas for operations where IoT can deliver significant business values, which could be enriching client experience or make ways for faster growth. They need to take an integrated and holistic view of IoT, understand the opportunities it offers and build strong business cases for enhancing revenue, increasing efficiencies and improving asset management.

Developing robust data management and analytics capabilities will be crucial for organizations, to mine valuable insights from the data generated by the transactions and interactions that occur within the IoT ecosystem.

Things that service providers can offer:

There are a host of opportunities coming our way due to connected sensors, devices and machines right from life sciences firms executing remote monitoring of clinical trials to banks providing better offers and more engagement via tellers and ATMs.  The possibilities are endless.

We are helping our clients to take products to the marketplace faster, adapting to regulatory requirements, increasing efficiency, and most importantly, enabling new sources of value. Our Skylab framework helps the clients quote, invent, and innovate across a variety of different devices, cloud infrastructure, big data schemes, mobile and wearable devices. Furthermore, we have been able to leverage our expertise in big data, machine data and cognitive analytics space and provide end-to-end IoT implementation for our clients.

For example, the work that we are doing for a large healthcare client where we have been able to get involved in concept, business justification, blueprinting, future forward and delivery. Using our Skylab framework and the Uber delivery model within a short span of just five months we were able to deliver a medication adherence solution including device prototyping, a health grid application, API marketplace and mobile companion apps that have connected devices that we built for them - now talking to each other. We have been able to successfully translate the output from all these connected devices into insights using Cognitive APIs and Watson IoT.

Cognitive IoT is not a distant concept for future consideration, the time is now. The IoT is experiencing exponential growth fueled by decreasing costs in computing, the proliferation of mobile devices, ubiquitous connectivity and the rise of cloud computing.

Our Smart IoT solutions provide transformative capabilities for our clients’ businesses by successfully deploying connected products. We will have to partner with our customers to identify IoT business cases and allowing them to work more efficiently, to solve some of their most intractable business challenges; to improve the way they work internally and the way their services work for their end-customers.