IoT Applications bring the data to life. They are an absolute central to the trillions of dollars of value promised by IoT.
The end user applications provide a wide range of functions from monitoring and visualising the data to advanced analytics, automated control and machine learning. They are usually web-based, and can be accessed from any web browser.
Mobile access to applications is obviously extremely important to many users, and today’s applications are either designed for mobile browsing or are specific mobile apps which optimised for small touchscreens.
The main functions provided by an IoT application are…
Contents
Dashboards & Visualisations
Dashboards are generally at the core of visualizing IoT data. The present a view of the data received from the sensors, usually in personalised way – or at least that is specific to your industry.
Depending on the application, the dashboard can either be ready-made for your industry, or you have the option to build your own dashboard – often without coding.
Alarms & Notifications
Visualizing the data is great, but once the novelty of the pretty widgets and graphs wears off, you need to extract some real value from your system. One of the simplest ways to do this is by implementing alarms, alerts and notifications which will inform you – by email, SMS, twitter and many other methods – that something has happened that requires you to take action.
This could be a temperature that’s outside a defined range, an excessive use of energy within your home, a risk of mould (due to high humidity), a leaking pipe, a machine that’s vibrating in an irregular way indicating imminent failure, or for an almost infinite number of other reasons.
Aggregation
Alarms are useful, but sometimes an alarm on a single condition isn’t useful on it’s own. Aggregation allows rules to be created which combine multiple sources of data – which together provide a more useful indication of a problem.
Analytics
As it’s name suggests, Analytics is the process of analysing the making sense of the data. When people talk about the valuable functions of IoT, analytics is often at the top of the list.
Many IoT teams include data scientists whose task is to translate the terabytes of ‘Big Data’ generated by IoT systems in to useful actionable insights via the process of analytics.
They often employ advanced algorithms, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence to interpret and monetize the data.
Control & Automation
In many industries, remotely controlling a device is far more important than visualisng the data.
Control – especially automated control based on knowledge gained from analysing your data have been proven to bring incredible optimisations to process flows and business operations.
Control is especially important in Smart Agriculture and Industrial environments. The term ‘Industry 4.0’ – the 4th Industrial Revolution, has automated control based on analytics at it’s core.
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Integrations
An end to end IoT solution with all the visualisations, analytics, automated control, bells, and whistles required is not a small task and it’s absolutely essential the IoT companies partner with specialist providers who either bring technology or market expertise to make the end to end solution a success.
Integration simply refers to a method for one product to connect to and work seamlessly with another – either by development teams from different companies working closely together, or by open standard interfaces and API’s which allow connectivity and functionality of the partner platform or application to be used.
System Admin (Users, Sensors, Network)
All of the sections above relate to extracting data from the IoT network, but none of it will happen without setting up your system first. IoT platform providers try to make this part as simple as possible – and will often claim that it will take no time at all.
The reality is that for a non-technical person who just wants his crops to be watered without getting up at 5am, it can be a challenge – and there are many specialist end to end solution providers, system integrators and specialist IoT consultants who can deliver a fully working solution without tears.