¿Es realmente tan importante el Internet de las cosas?

While the Internet of Things is a new, and probably way overused, term there are some really important implications of it. It will likely change our future and is already starting today -- even though you may or may not already know it! Here are a few ways IoT will improve our lives over time.

Traffic monitoring

Google car or not, this could be really useful to boost the traffic conditions; particularly in the metropolis.

Healthcare monitoring

The image above is just an example of how the IoT could improve our health condition (no, i’m not a dog). You, your doctor or a “virtual” doctor could check real time data (such as temperature, pulse, position etc..) from a patient that simply own a smart-watch. This could be a bit strange for someone healthy, but think about a baby or a senior affection from Alzheimer.

Predictive maintenance

The industries have a problem called unplanned breakdown that make them lost lot of money (due to the interruption of the production line). This could be overcome thanks to the predictive maintenance that uses data from the IoT sensors, analysed by artificial intelligence, to predict when a machinery is going to break.

Maybe, this examples aren't enough to affirm that IoT will be the killer app of the future. Furthermore by 2020 the problem will be the amount of devices connected to internet: 50 billions. This will make a huge quantity of data, called big data, that will be hard to analyse with the simple cloud computing that we are using now. If the data is not analysed, they are useless and the same IoT will be useless.

But the future may be more radiant thanks to a technology that could help significantly the IoT: fog computing.

The fog computing is a technology that could support this huge amount of data because, thanks to which, it will be possible to pre-analyse them through the network nodes. With the fog computing we are giving intelligence to devices that until now is just used to route internet packages.

Now, assuming that the IoT will not have any technology limitation, I’d wait before say that it will just help us with the home automation.

Projected market share of dominant IoT applications by 2025 took from Internet of Things: A Survey on Enabling Technologies, Protocols, and Applications.

The data are the future, use the data effectively will be the challenge of the next years and IoT will create a lot of them.

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This answer was originally posted by Pietro Nardelli on Quora.