How IoT Can Help Your Business See It All

The IoT enables businesses to uncover deep insights about every facet of their operations including minute things that may have escaped detection before When taken together in aggregate addressing these many small defects or missed opportunities can dramatically improve performance and ultimately increase profitsThe Anatomy of an IoT SystemTo appreciate the benefits of IoT for business and everyday life it39s useful to understand its component parts and how they work together While the specific applications of every IoT system are different the basic underlying structure of each is relatively standard It can includeSensorequipped devices and quotthingsquot that generate dataEdge computing that applies analytics to that data close to where it is collected sometimes in the thing itselfAI and machine learning that actamp160on the data to transform it into useful business intelligence or other actionable insights andComputer vision which is AI applied to visual imagesThe key element of IoT is of course quotthingsquot Connected devices from driverless cars to Xray machines form the foundation of all IoT systems Things generate data amp8212 lots of it Until now this data went either uncollected or unobserved and in most cases unused because it couldn39t be understood in any actionable way or because there was simply too much of it to process In other cases data may have been collected from connected machines but could only be transformed by analytics in the cloudThe cloud is a set of highly scalable computer storage and memory capabilities located in a data center separate from where the things are Data from things can be acted on with analytics in the cloud but it has to travel there first often at giant volumes or frequencies Think of how much data is created by a single traffic camera scanning the streets 247 or one of dozens of Xray machines in a hospital continuouslyamp160capturing images of patientsThat39s where edge computing comes in Edge computing means processing data from things amp8212 such as factory machines or cameras in a smart city amp8212 near the edge of the network where the data is being generated instead of at a more distant centralized location such as a data center or the cloud Edge computing enables enhanced decisionmaking through greateramp160accuracy efficiencyamp160reliability and speed It is able to generate these advantages through less latency lower broadband demand and relatively decreased costs One of the more prominent examples of edge computing in IoT today is data processing in selfdriving cars where the benefits of harnessing computing power near the location of the quotthingquot the driverless car is obviousArtificial intelligence AI which has been defined simply as quotmaking sense of dataquot is really an umbrella term for a broad set of computer algorithms that allow machines to sense reason act and adapt in ways similar to or in some cases better than humans Practically speaking AI is the application amp8212 whether on the edge or in the cloud amp8212 that acts in response to and on the data generated by things For example an AI application in a manufacturing IoT environment might predict factory equipment failures before they happen based on algorithms applied to the vast amounts of data the connected equipment might produce on information such as machine temperatureFinally a subset of AI is computer vision This technology is artificial intelligence that allows computers to quotseequot identifying and analyzing images made by connected cameras From capturing product defects on an assembly line to monitoring traffic in a smart city computer vision is the application that makes sense of and acts on visual images of all kindsIn SumWhether big or small all IoT systems combine some or all of the following component parts amp8212 sensorequipped devices that generate data edge computing AI and computer vision amp8212 to make connected machines and ultimately entire business operations run more efficientlyBy leveraging endtoend IoT platforms businesses in all industries are transforming their operations and customer experiences As you consider your business39s next step on its IoT journey click here for five questions to ask yourselfClick the social buttons to share this story with your friends and colleaguesThe opinions and points of view expressed in this content are exclusively the views of the author andor subjects and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillagecomMyersBizNet Inc management or associated writers

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How IoT Can Help Your Business See It All

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How IoT Can Help Your Business See It All

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