Add to favorites How will it work and what are the challenges?
3. What about Healthcare?
Businesses collaborations are also encouraged to put forward proposals in healthcare, where Appleyard says IoT is being applied to reduce costs and improve the quality of care.
"We’ve got three major parties already out there in what we call delivering assisted-living lifestyle at scale (DALLAS), which involves 600,000 patients in these trials," he explains.
"We’re trying to keep people out of hospital as it’s very expensive to keep them in hospital. If you’re going to have them leading independent lives in their own home it’s better for them and saves money.
"In order to be able to do that, you need the IoT capability, which includes sensors, alarms, information systems linking back to their GP."
4. The challenge
Failure to agree a standardised approach for components in this emerging technology sector could result in failure, according to Appleyard, who studied 200 smarthomes across the UK a couple of years ago.
"The problem is that you couldn’t pick up a sensor or dashboard from one of them and use it on any of the others because they had all been developed by different people for different purposes," he explains.
"So the challenge is to get to the point where you have a marketplace where you can make a new box, which would work in any of the smarthomes or smart transports or urban environments because you’ve got standards, which allow you to operate these things…making sure that they can all talk together."
He also worries how Ofcom will manage the limited amount of radio spectrum.
"As we increase the number of devices connected, we risk overloading parts of the Internet itself. IP addresses are already in short supply, and wireless spectrum is becoming scarce," he says.
"The industry will need to work out how to manage these scarce resources, and government has a role to play in helping them to agree how."
5. Collaboration
Appleyard makes the point that the true vision of IoT will require a collaboration among vendors with differing areas of expertise.
"Businesses naturally compete with one another. They don’t naturally cooperate with one another to solve these problems, so that’s what a lot of the public intervention is around, is helping the businesses to cooperate with one another."
