IoT and wearable devices to drive market for many trillions of sensors in 15 years
At a recent Trillion Sensor Summit that took place in Munich, the driving theme was inspired by “Abundance” defined as a world without hunger, a clean environment and energy and medical care to all, to be enabled in one generation through technological innovations by so called exponential technologies producing goods and services faster than global demand. All this requires networked sensors, capable of collecting data and exchanging information.
Beyond technology, the roll-out of ubiquitous sensor applications will destroy industries — and create new ones.
According to a Fraunhofer EMFT press release, networked sensors are one of the exponential technologies with forecasted demand up to 45 trillion sensors in 20 years. The biggest global economic tides, such as Digital Health and Internet of Everything (forecasted by Cisco to grow the global economy by $19 trillion by 2020, to represent over 20% of global GDP) are positioned to make Abundance a reality. The Abundance concept was introduced in the bestselling 2012 book by Peter Diamandis and Steve Kotler of the same title.
Is this realistic? We have predicted Utopia many times in human history only to find that things do not usually work as planned. Trillions of sensors are probably going to happen, but, they will help us manage, conserve and use scarce resources more efficiently.
More to the point, as we see the use of sensors explode in smartphones, this can be expected to continue in wearable devices, which will essentially be add-on sensor systems for the smartphone. It would be reasonable to see the smartphone become the universal controller of everything much like the PC became the centre of the computing world. These trends where smartphones are used to control and monitor are already seen in healthcare, medicine and home automation to mention a few.
To illustrate the breadth of this point, Dartmouth researchers and their colleagues recently built the first smartphone app that automatically reveals students’ mental health, academic performance and behavioral trends. In other words, your smartphone knows your state of mind — even if you don’t — and how that affects you.
The StudentLife app, which compares students’ happiness, stress, depression and loneliness to their academic performance, also may be used in the general population – for example, to monitor mental health, trigger intervention and improve productivity in workplace employees.
“The StudentLife app is able to continuously make mental health assessment 24/7, opening the way for a new form of assessment,” says computer science Professor Andrew Campbell, the study’s senior author.
The mobile industry is in the first stages of a revolution driven by apps, and sensors will provide the data inputs to drive whatever application a particular app is written for. Potentially, the possibilities are only limited by human ingenuity.
The IoT will extend the Internet to devices and machines at home in the office or out in industry. Eventually everything will be connected, but here sensors are needed to know the status and where all these devices are. Machines can notify their users when they need maintenance and repair. Retail can track and monitor everything, a true ‘cradle to grave philosophy’.
The Trillion Sensor Summit offered a snapshot of this exploding universe. Janusz Bryzek, originator and chairman of the Trillion Sensor Summit initiative and co-chair of the Munich meeting, gave an impression of the economic potential of the mobile sensor market today and in the future.
Between 2007 and 2014, this market has grown from $2 billion to $13 billion annually. At the same time, the complexity of these sensors exploded from 1000 to 1 million transistors per sensor. And this expansion wont stop by no means in the overseeable future, Bryzek said. While the number of sensors in operation around the globe today is in the range of some ten billions, this number will make another breath-taking hike. Within the next 15 years, the world will see it rise to a number somewhere in the double-digit trillion range, Bryzek predicted.
Enablers for this giant market are breakthroughs in the fields of biotechnology, medicine, nanomaterials, networking, computational systems and robotics. A particular important role will play the availability of 3D printing systems at a large scale, Bryzek said. MEMS and MEMS-based systems will play a major role in sensor development, he added.
Challenges in the trillion sensor summit roadmap include slow cycle times for commercialisation and standardisation. At the technology level, the algorithms enabling the derivation of useful information have yet to be developed in a way that suits large numbers of distributed sensors. And if many sensors throw their data to some kind of collection point, bandwidth issues are almost certain to arise. Last but not least, user adoption is vital to the propagation of the IoT.
Further it is likely that this won’t be a self-propelling model: Sensors – and the machines equipped with them – will kill jobs. In the US alone, 50 percent of the currently existing workforce will be displaced by robots within the decade ahead, Bryzek predicted. And if this would not be enough, 40% of the current Fortune 500 companies will give way to new companies we did not hear about yet. But no reason to become desperate: The IoT will create a total of 172 million jobs, mostly for knowledge workers, by 2020, Bryzek quoted a Cisco forecast.
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