Getting pregnant is much harder than movies would have you believe.In fact, women have only a 25 percent chance of getting pregnant every month. So, it’s no surprise that couples are keen to improve their odds. IoT makes it a little easier.Why it’s hard to get pregnant?
There is just a 12- to 24-hour window each month when a human egg can be fertilized by a sperm. This fertile window occurs during the six days after ovulation while the egg passes down the fallopian tube. Pinpointing the exact time period, though, is hard because it varies from woman to woman. Sex has to take place within this fertile window to maximize the chances of becoming pregnant.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
What would you do to avoid getting stuck in traffic? Some commuters leave at dawn to beat rush-hour traffic. Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts. Literally. Congestion costs every U.S. household $1,700 annually, according to a recent study by The Economist. These costs result from the time wasted by drivers and the fuel burned by idling cars while stuck in traffic jams. IoT traffic management systems provide relief by remotely adjusting traffic lights to speed traffic flows. Architecting the solution
The traffic management solution design follows a proven IoT design model.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Sometimes a little help is all it takes, especially when you have technical skills to offer.You may have exactly the skills a non-profit needs to expand its social impact. Or perhaps you could help a motivated youth get his or her first technical job. Your technical expertise becomes even more meaningful when volunteered for the greater good. How do you start?Answer these questions to find the volunteering opportunities that could make the most of your skills.
What social cause inspires you? Education? Environmental issues? Helping the disadvantaged? Disaster relief?
What skills do you have to share? Programming? Systems design? Training?
How much time can you allocate to volunteering?
Could you volunteer onsite or only online?
Your answers will help narrow the search of non-profits to research. The Idealist directory lists thousands of non-profit organizations. Here are three I’ve volunteered with that look for technical experts. Perhaps one might be right for you, too?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Batmobile is the ultimate crime-fighting vehicle. Today’s police cars aren’t far behind, thanks to IoT and new connectivity solutions.Meeting the needs of both public safety and law enforcement on a tight budget is challenging. Four major requirements first have to be met.
How do you respond quickly to a wide range of incidents that might occur over a large area at any time with limited police resources?
How can information (such as car license plates) be collected and referenced against online databases while traveling at high speeds?
How can sensors capture and process information in order to give police officers more time?
How can encounters between the police and public be easily recorded in detail?
Multi-WAN routers, IoT systems, vehicle scanners, body cameras and a crime database all come together to make this possible.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There’s nothing worse than rushing to put out a fire only to find the hydrant isn’t working. How do you make sure the hundreds of fire hydrants in a city are working properly?Typically hydrants are inspected manually, but that is a slow and costly process whose results are often out of date. It's now possible, though, to remotely monitor hydrants for malfunctions or vandalism without having to spend a fortune.Designing IoT-enabled hydrant system
Consider a small city such as Des Plaines, Illinois, which illustrates the challenges involved with monitoring and repairing hydrants. The city extends over 14 square miles and has 3,600 fire hydrants. It could take a few months for a small team of inspectors to manually inspect each hydrant.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There’s nothing worse than rushing to put out a fire only to find the hydrant isn’t working. How do you make sure the hundreds of fire hydrants in a city are working properly?Typically hydrants are inspected manually, but that is a slow and costly process whose results are often out of date. It's now possible, though, to remotely monitor hydrants for malfunctions or vandalism without having to spend a fortune.Designing IoT-enabled hydrant system
Consider a small city such as Des Plaines, Illinois, which illustrates the challenges involved with monitoring and repairing hydrants. The city extends over 14 square miles and has 3,600 fire hydrants. It could take a few months for a small team of inspectors to manually inspect each hydrant.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Transplanting organs is a matter of life and death. That’s why a donated organ has to be transported quickly and safely.There are more than 120,000 people on the United Network For Organ Sharing (UNOS) National Waiting List. Some patients have to wait up to five years for an organ donation. With so much at stake, how do you make sure a donated organ is transported safely to the recipient?Organ donation process
The demand for donated organs greatly exceeds the supply, so patients are carefully screened before being added to the Organ Waiting List. The Health Resources & Services Administration (HRSA) defines the policies to be followed by the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN). Here is a simplified version of the protocol used to allocate donated organs:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Navigating through a subway is like a scavenger hunt: You have to look for clues on where to go next.And GPS, though it works well above ground where satellites provide coordinates to find your bearings, can't help. Underground you can't get accurate coordinates to determine your location and choose a path. Multiple underground floors, thick walls and dozens of stairways mean a different solution is needed—one that:
Has virtual guideposts that allow a person to get their bearings deep underground
Is affordable so that hundreds of beacons can be installed for better accuracy
Is a self-powered system that doesn’t require batteries
Underground in Tokyo: Navigating the Shibuya Station
Tokyo is attempting to solve the navigation problem in its Shibuya Station. The station, a maze with eight train lines, has more than a million people traveling its confusing pathways and platforms every day. To help those commuters, the city is implementing an ambitious project that uses augmented reality (AR), Bluetooth beacons and a mobile app to direct passengers to their destination. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The World Food Program warns that droughts, fires and storms could endanger food security for billions of people. To adapt, farmers need current, local and reliable information to help them choose the seeds and planting schedules best suited to local weather conditions.Traditional weather sensors, however, are often too expensive and difficult to operate in large parts of the developing world. This results in scarce farming and weather data for much of the globe.Farmers need hyperlocal information—both timely and local. With IoT and new connectivity options, affordable sensors that are easy to operate can collect the vital information farmers require.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Farming is difficult. Farming outside the power grid is close to impossible.For many electric utilities, it’s hard to justify the investment needed to extend the power grid to remote farms. Cellular providers also prefer to build cell towers where there are many customers. On top of that, farmers have little purchasing power individually, making it hard for them to negotiate power and coverage from large utilities and cellular providers.The power of cooperatives
Farmers strengthen their bargaining power by forming cooperatives. This enables them to negotiate for more services and better prices. Cooperatives are businesses-owned and controlled by the people who use them—not shareholders. There are nearly 3,000 farmer cooperatives in the U.S. owned by a million farmers and ranchers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Farming is difficult. Farming outside the power grid is close to impossible.For many electric utilities, it’s hard to justify the investment needed to extend the power grid to remote farms. Cellular providers also prefer to build cell towers where there are many customers. On top of that, farmers have little purchasing power individually, making it hard for them to negotiate power and coverage from large utilities and cellular providers.The power of cooperatives
Farmers strengthen their bargaining power by forming cooperatives. This enables them to negotiate for more services and better prices. Cooperatives are businesses-owned and controlled by the people who use them—not shareholders. There are nearly 3,000 farmer cooperatives in the U.S. owned by a million farmers and ranchers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Smart appliances are supposed to be the next big thing. Analysts predict that it’s a multi-billion dollar market. Why aren’t we there yet? Security. It’s a challenge for both manufacturers and users.Once connected to the internet, IoT devices can do amazing things, but they also become vulnerable to hackers. There are two main reasons for this:
Limited resources: Low-cost IoT toolkits simplify the task of developing new smart devices. The downside of these devices is that they’re often too underpowered to run security software or communicate securely.
Lack of standards: Connected devices vary greatly in their security safeguards by manufacturer. If one device is hacked, it potentially compromises other devices on the same network.
Cloud-enabled security
Chime from Innovation Labs by AVG (the antivirus and online security company) protects smart appliances by ensuring network traffic is authorized only to approved websites and mobile apps. Chime is installed on Wi-Fi routers and uses an online directory to stay current with new malware and hacking threats. It applies security techniques originally developed for enterprise security to also protect connected devices:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Drowning in data is a real hazard with the Internet of Things (IoT). How should decisions be made with this flood of sensor data? A hybrid approach combining human intelligence and computing power works well. People are good at making decisions that require nuance and judgement, such as identifying hate speech in online postings. Computerized analytics is better at quickly processing large volumes of data. How do you combine the human thought-making process with the scalability of computing power? In machine learning, this is called supervised learning, where a computer program is taught to "mimic" the thought making-process of a human expert. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Rivers in Honduras flood frequently and suddenly, wreaking havoc, washing away houses, ruining crops and displacing families. Could IoT help provide early warning of floods?Robert Ryan-Silva took on this challenge with the Hidrosónico project. As director of the DAI maker lab, he’s an expert in applying technology for humanitarian projects around the world.Many villages and farms in Honduras are prone to flooding because they are on river banks. Designing a solution was challenging. It had to detect rising flood waters and alert families to evacuate in time. The solution had to be affordable, rugged and easy to install. Making things harder was the fact that mobile phones had only 20 percent penetration in Honduras.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Over a million workers suffered back injuries last year, costing U.S. firms over $70 billion. A single incident can cost a firm over $6,000. Why are there so many back injuries? How can IoT help reduce injuries and expenses?The demand to work faster often causes bad lifting habits. Couple this with bad operations design, and you can see why there are so many back injuries. The Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA) recommends ergonomic equipment and workflow design to reduce the physical demands on workers. To begin with, it helps to know which activities and equipment cause the most injuries to workers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
An IoT solution isn't the first idea that comes to mind when you're standing in the African heat, thinking of ways to empower a village. But that's exactly what happened.Brandi DeCarli and Scott Thompson had been building a Youth Empowerment Center from a modified shipping container in Kisumu, Kenya, as part of the UN Habitat Program. While doing this work, they realized that the local community lacked basic necessities, such as access to fresh and healthy food. They thought, why not use a modified shipping container to provide a plug-and-play farming unit?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Catching viruses before they spread is hard. They often originate in remote areas, and spread by insects. Further, location makes it difficult to analyze blood samples for infections in order to treat them early.The challenge is urgent. Once infectious diseases such as Yellow Plague and Ebola spread, they are much harder to contain and manage. That means it's essential to catch outbreaks quickly, especially when diseases can be spread rapidly by mosquitos. For if you can identify them quickly, you can quarantine and treat patients before they infect others.+ Also on Network World: Challenges for IoT: Connectivity, protocols, funding +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
You may be better off not inhaling—especially when you consider all the airborne pollutants indoors.The EPA estimates that there are over 65,000 chemicals releasing pollutants into the air that are often too small for regular air filters to catch. Mold, flame retardants on carpets, and vapors from synthetic materials are just some of the sources of this type of pollution. For people with breathing difficulties, children, and the elderly, the impact is especially hazardous.Biome's solution is based on bio-mimicry: "innovation that seeks sustainable solutions to human challenges by emulating nature’s time-tested patterns and strategies.The goal is to create products, processes, and policies—new ways of living—that are well-adapted to life on earth over the long haul. The core idea is that nature has already solved many of the problems we are grappling with. Animals, plants, and microbes are the consummate engineers." To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
“Timber!” That’s what you hear from a lumberjack in movies before a tree comes crashing down.But that’s not what you’ll hear in rainforests while one tree after another is cut down. Why? The logging is often illegal, and the last thing the culprits want is to attract attention.Rainforests once covered 14 percent of the earth's land surface. Now they cover just 6 percent, and experts estimate that the last remaining rainforests could be consumed in less than 40 years. (The Amazon rainforest itself produces 20 percent of the world’s oxygen.)Worst still, wildlife and local cultures that depend on the rainforest ecosystem are being wiped as well. Local authorities and indigenous tribes are fighting back against the illegally clearing of the rainforest for commercial farming. This tussle between poor villagers and well-funded commercial logging interests is pretty one-sided, but IoT is helping to level the playing field a little.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Finding the sweet spot for your sensors is a challenge in many IoT projects. Collect too little data, and there isn’t enough to act on. Collect too much data, and the costs might jeopardize your project. So, where is the sweet spot for your application? GoalA retail store chain was looking for an affordable retail analytics system. It needed to track people's movements to help improve the store layout and learn more about customers' shopping behavior. The solution had to be easy to deploy, be discreet and not require any changes from shoppers. The solution was designed on the fact that most shoppers would have mobile phones, which could be used as an approximate count for the number of people in the store and could also help track their movements as they moved from one Wi-Fi hotspot to another.A "People Sensor" was designed using the principle that mobile phones share their MAC address with Wi-Fi hotspots as part of the "handshake process" in order to obtain connectivity. ( MAC addresses are not associated with a specific individual or a mobile phone number, helping to preserve privacy. ) The sensor was built by modifying the firmware Continue reading
Deepak Puri