Internet of Things: Connecting to a Sustainable Future

From smart fridges, to wearable health monitoring devices, connected energy grids and networked thermostats, a great deal has been reported over the past few years on the potential of digitising the physical world. Today it is clear that ‘the internet of things’ (IoT) is connecting ever more devices over the internet - using sensors and microchips – for machines to talk to each other, to other applications and to talk to us. Our view at Zouk is that IoT is enabling a sustainability revolution with two levels of efficiency at its core – improving energy efficiency in the first order, and generating significant productivity gains through connectivity in the second.

To put this efficiency gains in context, we can take lighting as an example. A traditional energy efficiency goal would be to design a better lightbulb, which might improve its energy consumption by 10%. In a digital efficiency context, in a ‘smart city’ if every streetlight in a city uses sensors and is connected to the Internet, lighting can be fully optimised across the entire city lighting system – saving energy but also saving time, resources and reducing downtime. By applying analytics to sensors and location data in real time, the improvements are fully automated, take little additional equipment and are highly scalable in nature.

In fact, there is a quiet revolution underway in our lives and much of this, is made possible by IoT. Everywhere we look, its influence is in our lives - reaching into factories and shops, improving operating efficiencies as well as creating systems in vehicles such as autonomous cars or in flight navigation or in engine efficiency. It is core to human devices that monitor our health, it helps us in the home where systems connected to the internet control our heating or security.