Internet of things

Due to increased number of gadgets, appliances, equipment around us everywhere, for safety purposes, to minimize the cost in energy consumption and the desire for smart environment (smart life, smart home, smart office), it has become essential to connect all the devices and control them manually or automatically from a centralized location based on the data generated from them. This is achievable by Internet-of-Things concept. This blog explains Internet-of-Things concept, factors enabling it to be widely adapted and what Sasken is doing in this area.

Internet-of-Things is a concept that tries to connect various devices/objects around us in residential, commercial and office buildings. This provides a platform for generating, transmitting, analyzing data from these devices/objects. This analysis helps in inferring some insights and taking decisions based on which the devices are configured/controlled automatically or manually.

Though this concept has been in existence from around 1990s, this is being widely adapted recently due to the following factors

1. Availability of miniature chipsets/SoCs like Intel Quark, Marvel MW300 Wi-Fi microcontroller, the MB300 Bluetooth microcontroller, the MZ100 ZigBee microcontroller, GainSpan’s GS2000.
2. Availability of software frameworks to enable Internet-of-Things concept. Some of these frameworks are Alljoyn/Allseen from Qualcomm, Kinoma & EZ Connect from Marvel, Oracle’s Java based IoT platform
3. Availability of connected devices like light bulbs, refrigerators, washing machines, energy meters through Wi-Fi, Bluetooth (BLE), Zigbee, Z-Wave, cellular and Ethernet.
4. Availability of cloud computing platforms like BigData, Microsoft Azure

Sasken, with its expertise on various software & hardware platforms & with its partnership with various chipset vendors & OEMs, is developing a solution with following features

1. Devices at various locations in its building monitor & transmit temperature data to a center server where analysis happens & notifies if the values are not within safe range.
2. Monitor number of people in a section of a building. Based on this, air conditioning system is controlled.
3. Based on the occupancy, control lights (on/off, control intensity)
4. Transmit heart rate and other health parameters like blood pressure from wearable devices to a central server where analysis is done & the person is notified if there are any abnormal symptoms.

Authored by: Krishna Kishore