The Internet of Things is a state where the things on the face of the earth connect to the internet and start talking to each other. Things here can be electronic, electrical, mechanical, or electro-mechanical objects.
Imagine waking up in the morning to your favorite music playing in the background; once you walk into the bathroom, the lights come on automatically and the mirror greets you with the latest Instagram or Twitter feed while it analyzes your sleep pattern to see how well you have slept to show you a feed based on your mood.
You wash and move to the kitchen to find the coffee machine has already turned on a few minutes ago to serve you a cup of hot coffee. Your toaster has auto-inserted the last couple of slices of bread from its tray and checked with the refrigerator to see there is any more bread. The refrigerator checks its inventory and discovers that it is out of bread and adds the bread to your shopping cart and places an order with an online grocery store.
Meanwhile, your self-driven car is reading your calendar for meetings that you need to attend across town and plans the routes for an optimal and smooth journey. The moment you walk out of your home, the environment sensors detect the lack of humans, shut down everything that is consuming power, and move into a hibernate mode.
Now, this is Internet of Things, where all the things talk to each other and make your life an absolute pleasure.
What I have described is no longer a vision or a dream. It is how we may live one day in the very near future. There are already things such as smart fridges, smart washing machines, and smart water purifiers on the market today and people are buying them one at a time to get acquainted with the technology. Soon, we will have a system in place that will interface with all these devices; that is when we will realize the true power of IoT.
The example I have given centers around a smart home. It is very important to understand that IoT is not limited to smart homes. The same technology that we used to make our refrigerator order groceries online can be used to tell us when our car needs to be serviced next, the duration of traffic light signals at a particular hour of the day, or when a conveyer belt in a factory floor needs to be changed.
With IoT, you no longer need to worry about a diet plan; you can tell your refrigerator, your stove, and your weighing scales that you are on a diet and they will take care of that for you.
There are two sides to any coin. IoT can be very helpful and at the same time can be very annoying.
Imagine every move of yours is monitored and relayed to other services so everything is connected and in sync; this may be a bit of a challenge at times. Imagine your doctor calling you when you are going to eat a second serving of a cake... pretty annoying, right?
We rely heavily on connectivity and synchronization between devices and if things don't sync well, then the chaos will be in the order of n, where n is number of devices that this device needs to sync with.
On the lighter side of things, imagine a world where all your smart devices have an active online presence posting information about themselves and all you need to do is follow them on social media and you will know everything about them.
And if any two devices do not want to talk to each other, because they have an ego issue, we are doomed for sure.
The next key thing in the world of IoT is data privacy and security. Since all the devices talk to each other and share this information over the internet there is always an onlooker who is interested in that data. They may be monitoring your door sensor data that is being transmitted and then may act in your absence. Or they can tamper with the data by intercepting the packet and sending a spoofed packet on behalf of the door sensor itself.
Imagine a time and age where you need to buy a firewall for your toaster, because someone is tampering with the crispness of your toast.
We will talk more about security and data privacy in the coming chapters.
All this loosely summarizes the major part of what IoT is. We will deep dive into various areas as we go along.
In the next section, we are going to look at the history of IoT.