TiE Boston organized a session on The Future of IoT: An Interactive Discussion on Wednesday January 25, 2017 in Cambridge, MA. The expert speakers were Mak Joshi, Director, IoT and Digital Transformation, Schneider Electric; Michael Long, Smart Building / Smart City Strategy Manager, Analog Devices; and Chris Jones, Vice President of Technology, iRobot. The event was moderated by Ameeta Soni, Co-founder and Advisor, FitTrace. In addition, there was a presentation on use of IoT in health care. The event was attended by more than 100 people.

“Digital transformation requires a comprehensive approach involving process, people and tool,” said Joshi. IoT have made huge advances in the past 10 years. Some of the major benefits of IoT are:

Lower total cost of ownership, decreased failure cost, decreased average maintenance cost/asset, lower unscheduled downtimes, increased asset useful life, reduced time to fix, flexible outcome-based, OPEX business models, and reduced risk through early warning of impeding equipment failures and maintenance expertise continuity in high turnover environment.

Long talked not only about smart building but also about smart cities. A smart home is a home that uses rich spatial information to seamlessly orchestrate all the home’s connected devices and delivers on the consumer’s personalized smart home preferences. 

According to Long, “New IoT spatial architecture partitioning delivers scaled value, some locally and some through the cloud.”

The focus of IoT in health care lies in communications hardware integrated into devices, making devices inexpensive – perhaps disposable, and more efficiency, longer battery life and transdermal charging.

Some of the issues related to IoT that were discussed focused on:

interoperability, availability of city open software, funding for CAPEX from city council, dissemination of information for citizenry, shared business model for real time data and who owns the data, privacy issues, policies related to transmitting images from inside homes, different security levels, regulatory issues and costs, and the funding trend towards investments in disposables rather than equipment.