Updated June 7, 2023

Introduction to Uses of IoT

Uses of IoT (Internet of Things) are the industries implementing IoT devices and technologies for technical advancement. The uses and new capabilities are adding to this technology and are growing in year on year basis. Most organizations are using this technology to help make human life easier. Several industries use IoT, such as resource optimization through sensors in the manufacturing industry, real-time corp and water resource monitoring in agriculture, and IoT appliances in the Healthcare industry. Setting security standards to control the adverse effects of IoT use is crucial.

Uses of IoT in Various Industries

IoT will be the largest category of IT services in the upcoming years, which can change the industrial landscape. Let’s discuss various use cases of IoT grouped by type of industry.

1. Manufacturing Industry

IoT has been changing the industry landscape for manufacturing sectors in scale. Smart sensory data prevent abnormal breakdowns, requirement analysis, and resource optimization. IoT solutions help organizations in intelligent asset management and performance monitoring, which reduces asset downtime and increases hardware longevity. It also enables manufacturers with a lower time to marketability and large-scale customizations. For example, IoT helped bike manufacturer Harley Davidson to reduce the time to produce a complete bike from days to hours.

2. Agriculture Industry

As an industry, agriculture follows traditional experience-based operations, which depend heavily on human intervention. But with the changing economic landscape and the population increment, the supply-demand gap is huge. Changing environmental conditions, global warming is also a part of the challenge. IoT is probably the most powerful weapon for the agriculture and farming industry to fight this. IoT enables farm managers with real-time corp monitoring, precision farming, livestock management, smart greenhouse management, etc. Industry-grade drones also have multiple use cases in smart farming. On the one hand, drones are used to monitor air, soil, and moisture quality; on the other hand, they can help with physical activities like automated spraying of fertilizers, preventing physical breakouts in farms, etc.

3. Healthcare

One of the important sectors that will get benefit mostly from Industry grade IoT is healthcare. The popularity of smart devices and wearables are increasing day by day. This enables researchers with more and more data to incorporate IoT solutions. Data from wearables are used to prevent heart attacks, constantly monitor the heart rate, steps taken, tracking sleep, sitting postures, etc. IoT-based solutions with nano-technology are even used to monitor cancerous cells inside the body. IoT, along with machine learning, is changing the industry at a rapid scale.

4. Insurance

As an Industry, Insurance generally follows structured data. But it can potentially optimize the resources and claim settlement process using IoT. Recently Insurers have slowly started adhering to IoT in their industry solutions. Automated claims processing, automated reserve setting, damage assessment, etc., can utilize IoT solutions as a factor of premium calculation.

5. Home Automation

Controlling electronic instruments remotely is no longer science fiction; it’s already commercially available. IoT is used daily to make decisions and optimize power consumption automatically. Examples of IoT-based home automation devices that heavily utilize IoT and machine learning include Google Home and Amazon Echo.

6. Automobile and Transportation

In the internet era, automobiles are also considered gadgets where upgrades can be made on demand. Modern cars are equipped with IoT-based smart sensors that help in real-time car tracking, speed control, fuel consumption control, car renting solutions, etc. IoT and deep learning help develop automated parking systems, semi-autopilots, and self-driving cars.

7. Energy Sector

IoT solutions bring changes in energy sectors with valuable insights on power consumption, hardware maintenance, forecasting dynamic pricing, etc. The traditional power and energy sources and comparatively newer sectors like solar energy, wind energy, and waste recycling benefit from the use cases of IoT.

Industry Forecast and Global Trends of IoT

Following are the details of Globally Trends:

1. Report on IoT Spending by Industry

Market spending predictions are an essential tool for getting an idea of the industrial use cases of IoT. The demand graph gives a sense of the scale at which IoT is incorporated. Here we will highlight statistics from IDC(International Data Corporation) forecasting 2019, motivating you to dig more into your choice’s specific line of business.

2. Google Trends on IoT

Now let’s look at the global Google trends on IoT from 2004 to 2019. It will help to understand how IoT-based use cases are growing gradually.

Source: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=IoT

Conclusion

In this article, we discussed the various use cases of IoT in today’s industry and the industry forecast and global trends of IoT. Though here we mainly discussed the positive use cases of IoT, there are also some negative sides to it. IoT devices and artificial intelligence can hamper privacy and even hurt physically if not implemented properly. Properly regularized and benchmarked IoT solutions can change society in the upcoming decades.