As we previously mentioned, the IoT is a nebulous concept covering many specialist areas and industries. It’s more like an Internet of Diversity as opposed to an Internet of Things.
Take a simple usecase we came across at a recent IoT Meetup. A US company provides rodent control ‘as a service’, having thousands of traps over tens of mainly retail (food) sites. Every day, people go out and see which traps have caught rodents. This involves a huge amount of expensive manpower and vehicles. LORAWan, in this case, is being used with sensors on traps to allow only those traps needing attention having to be visited. This has led to a huge decrease in costs.
There are two observations. The first is that there’s value in what might initially seem to be mundane. The second is that this usecase is very different to many other diverse scenarios. There is no rat trap IoT solution you can buy off the shelf and it’s not cost effective for a 3rd party to develop and market one. Off the shelf RTLS solutions are unlikely to be suitable and even if they can collect the data, the dashboards and information aren’t applicable to this usecase.
We are already seeing that the IoT platforms that are most useful are those that are simple to change yet most flexible. Platforms need to be simple enough to customise for diverse usecases and yet be flexible enough to show data in a domain-specific way.