Creating a Social Impact with IoT
By: Byeongjun Moon
Tags: Social Change, IoT, Internet of Things, Innovation, Social Impact

Scaling IoT Solutions 📊

In other words, scalability! Scalability is soon becoming that one magic word to solve all problems on earth. And I’m not kidding.

Scalability, in Economics, refers to the concept that a company can increase sales given the increased resources. However, in tech, this might not necessarily be the case. In cases like deploying applications, scalability means making a piece of technology bigger and more expansive. Meanwhile, cloud computing (a process in which the computation happens on the cloud) allows both an increase and decrease in the amounts of technology consumption.

(Source: Business Insider)

As Grabner from Dynatrace elaborates at a Forbes interview, scalability can be explained through the “Supermarket software logic.” When a supermarket has a higher number of active customers at a particular time, they can allocate additional cashiers/provide a self-checkout option. Through this approach, the supermarket ensures a seamless shopping experience for all customers, regardless of the time they visit.

Especially for IoT, scalability is critical as it is one of the most overlooked aspects of the Proof-of-Concept (PoC) stage. Still, to prove that a solution will make an impact through scaling, things like system capacity, network planning, and infrastructure should be considered.

Creating Social Impact 🙌

With the scalability mentioned earlier, IoT can address and resolve society’s biggest challenges — one example is Food Production.

Agriculture plays a crucial role in our society: in Africa, it is the center of many of the countries’ economies; however, farmers face challenges in agriculture from poor farming techniques and marketing system — thus not moving up the social ladder and ensuring a stable life. Additionally, due to the disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, global extreme poverty rates are expected to rise for the first time in over 20 years; these make up a good reason for farmers to turn to IoT solutions. By installing sensors in the water system and the soil, farmers could monitor the status of their crops automatically and in real-time so that they could focus on another aspect of farming that requires more human intervention while saving up resources.

(Source: Electronic Design)

Some farms are pairing up IoT technology with Machine Learning and robotics to renovate the entire production process. Farms utilize automation in places like greenhouses to process the crops more efficiently while gaining access to more data and insights into their farms. Currently, the agriculture IoT market is expected to grow from $12.7 billion in 2019 to $20.9 billion by 2024, meaning enormous market potential in this field. By scaling these products into farms worldwide, there is a higher chance of success in growing crops — meaning that food production wouldn’t be a problem anymore.

Another example would be reducing carbon emissions — as climate actions are becoming a heated subject of discussion, large tech companies like AT&T are using IoT-based solutions to reduce not only their carbon footprint but also that of their customers. As most of their services cause environmental damage to a certain extent, they attempted to use IoT in objects like vehicles to minimize carbon emissions.

(Source: Deloitte)

As seen in Figure 1, an IoT-enabled fleet vehicle is able to collect/transfer information, ranging from the engine data to a theft monitoring dataset — enabling a more efficient way to transfer items using fleet vehicles.

Within their fleet of 80,000+ vehicles, AT&T’s IoT solutions optimized routing, enabled preventative maintenance, and minimized fuel utilization. Through this, they can meet their 10x carbon reduction goal as promised.

On an ending note 💡

To summarize, IoT has an incredible amount of potential to create social impacts, waiting for commercialization. With the increased accessibility to IoT sensors and devices, solving challenges such as Food Production and Reducing Carbon Footprint would be much easier.

Join me on an adventure to explore the potential applications of IoT — and how it can transform our lives.

tl;dr

IoT devices and technologies have already been proven to be effective; it comes down to scaling these solutions.

With the IoT devices' scalability, we can solve society’s biggest challenges — ranging from Food Insecurity to Carbon Emissions. There has been significant progress made, and the numbers speak.

As IoT sensors and devices become more accessible, these solutions allow more individuals and corporates to create a social impact.

Further reading