The need to integrate data is urgent and non-trivial, says the Father of IoT

#News(General) [ via IoTForIndiaGroup ]

Kevin Ashton has been an executive director and visiting engineer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he led work on the next generation of computing. Perhaps more importantly for this report, says Jeremy Cowan, he is the man who coined the term the ‘Internet of Things’. At the MuleSoft EMEA Summit at London’s ExCeL expo centre on November 13th he talked at length.
He began by demonstrating the pace of recent technological change, and how we all become quickly accustomed to it. A pixelated image of Pluto (left; in fact, only 15 black & white pixels) was shown resolving over a period of 85 years into a colourised and dramatically detailed image (below) of the erstwhile planet (it was reclassified to a dwarf planet in 2006).

Life-changing IoT application
Kevin Ashton cited two examples of new IoT applications. Some chronic lung diseases can be analysed by spirometers but these are costly and frequently unavailable in remote areas of Asia and Africa. He pointed to pioneering healthcare that is now being delivered in Kenya with patients blowing into a smartphone microphone. When transmitted to a hospital equipped with a spirometer, the volume of air inspired and expired by the lungs can now be analysed remotely with 95% accuracy.

In another example, Ashton showed how T-shirts destined for the US are mostly made in Bangladesh. The cost per T-shirt is US$0.22 (€0.19), as opposed to $7.47 (€6.61) for T-shirts made in the US. With a new robotised sewing machine (inevitably dubbed the Sewbot) humans are being replaced and the machine can produce one million T-shirts a year in the US at a cost of $0.33 (€0.29) each. He didn’t expand on the human cost of unemployment in Bangladesh but said that shipping costs are drastically reduced too.
“There’s a catch,” said Ashton. “If you had four separate systems delivering sensory information in your body you’d have a disintegrated mind.” He paid tribute to the role of solutions like MuleSoft’s Applications Network which is working with customers like confectionery and pet food maker Mars, and others as diverse as Airbus and Air Malta, to use Application Programme Interfaces (APIs) to integrate siloed data. “At the moment,” he added, “in the Internet of Things we have disintegrated data taking us to Indecision. This is non-trivial, we need to integrate all the data.”

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