A person wants to have his urine tested. He dips a test stripe similar to litmus paper in to his urine and takes a photograph of it from his smart phone.
Then he uploads the image to an app. After several minutes he gets his urine test results. Above story is not a science fiction where a writer predicting how the world is going to look like in the future. Healthy.io of Israel is doing exactly that. This is possible thanks to the technological advances in sensor technology, telecommunication, and computing joining together.
In the above example test stripe and smartphone camera act as sensors. Vast advances in wireless and fiber communication makes it possible to send those images to a server located in the other side of the world within few seconds. Advances in machine learning and big data analysis makes it possible for the server to analyze the image and then predict clinically useful parameters of a urinesample from it.
 Dr. Vijitha R. Herath
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Above is an example from thousands of more such examples how advances in sensor technology, telecommunication, and computing facilitate new and innovative business ideas. Internet of Things (IoT) revolution would make converting new and innovative business ideas to reality that much easier.IoT is defined as “The interconnection via the internet of computing devices embedded in everyday objects, enabling them to send and receive data”.
A modern smartphone consists of around ten advance sensors most prominent one being high resolution camera. Others include gyroscope, accelerometer, proximity sensor, magnetometer, and etc. In most cases sensors’ function of IoT can be performed using modern smart phones. Therefore, for a country with an advanced telecommunication infrastructure and advanced computing expertise it would be easier to utilize IoT revolution for the economic benefit by building new and innovative businesses.
The beauty of IoT is the ease it offers in building new business by minimizing capital requirement. In the example given in the previous paragraph customer has the sensor. Data exchange can be done through internet cheaply. Most of the capital goes to setting up high performance computing facilities. With the recent advances in computer technology cost for such facilities has gone down drastically.
Now let’s look at Sri Lankan scenario. Sri Lanka has a well-developed state of the art telecommunication network that provides broadband internet access to a large section of populace. Usage of smartphones is ubiquitous in Sri Lanka.
The third ingredient necessary to successfully deploy IoT based business is the expertise in advanced computing. Let’s look into this area more closely. Being a country with a large agriculture based industry, maintaining the quality of agricultural products reaching the markets is important to ensure the customer confident. If the customer confidence about a range of products deteriorate due to substandard quality of certain items, then customer will refrain from buying products from the whole range even though most items in the product range are of good quality. If there is a cost effective way of identifying substandard products earlier in the supply chain, then it could be possible to stop them from reaching the markets. IoT can help solve this problem. But, how? Suppose there is anexpert database that has gathered large amount of image information of a certain food product with a varying degree of quality. From this huge dataset it could be possible to extract certain parameters that points to the product quality. To do this, experts in the fields of food science, data analysis, and computing should get together and develop machine learning algorithms that enable computers to use huge quantities of data and come up with sensible quality parameters. Once this goal is achieved a buyer in the middle of the supply chain can take an image of the food product from his smartphone and upload the image to the expert database through an app.
When an image is received the expert database could analyze the image and grade the quality of the food product using information already existing in the system. Theresult can be conveyed back to buyers’ smartphone through internet. This process may take few minutes and the wholesale buyer could be able to verify the quality of the product he is buying. This brings us to the point we are trying to address. In order to build advance computing expertise that can perform tasks similar to the one discussed earlier it is necessary to train human resource in the areas of data analysis and machine learning algorithm development and bringthem together with subject experts in the individual areas of interest.
Therefore, in order for Sri Lanka to extract full benefit from the IoT revolution happening around us today, she needs take steps to develop human resources in the areas of data analysis and machine learning algorithm development as a beginning. Parallel to that steps need to be taken to improve the awareness among university and school students about business opportunities arising from the IoT revolution. With a competent workforce it would be easy for entrepreneurs to execute their innovative IoT based business ideas.
References
“From Hype To Reality – IOT” , Optics and Photonics News, September 2017.
The writer is a senior lecturer attached to the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Peradeniya
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