The Future of IoT-driven Innovations

How will IoT technologies be used in the nearest future?

2020 and the COVID-19 outbreak marked an unexpected accelerating point for IoT-driven technologies, especially when it comes to healthcare space. This includes remote patient monitoring and telediagnostics, where use of communication tools, apps and smart devices helps to prevent further spread of the disease and actually fight the pandemic, as well as taking care of other maladies during a time when physical contact with a doctor is much harder due to safety regulations and limited availability of regular healthcare services.

So, what is the future of IoT?

The COVID-19 pandemic has shaken the world, but Internet of Things-driven innovations can help

We’ve all heard about patients dying in ambulances while waiting for help. To help prevent this, various availability management tools have been developed to locate the closest hospital, bed, testing point, and so on, which in other words means enabling load-balancing across available medical facilities.

Another aspect which requires good connectivity is remote diagnosis and health monitoring. Depictions of remote analysis and medical assistance in shows such as The Jetsons have become reality, and COVID-19 means such services are quite often the only way to get medical help or prescriptions. With the help of modern IoT devices, we’re providing doctors with blood pressure, glucose level and oxygen saturation data, as well as ECG exam results, online and remotely.

This trend will definitively grow, and many of these devices, especially wearables, will require flawless Internet connectivity to get full features, cloud analytics and AI/ML-driven action recommendations.

IoT innovations to facilitate the vaccine supply chain

Another Health 4.0 use case, which is trending and will be even more vital in 2021, concerns real-time monitoring of vaccine cold supply chains and ensuring appropriate conditions during transport. None of these can be done properly without using mobile telecom services. Many of them will be addressed by smaller companies, working alone, but others will require appropriate quality of service, coverage and availability of back-end services that can only be successful with the active involvement of large telecom service providers.

It’s not only about healthcare

The same pressure has hit all other industries, and forced them to further automate their processes to ensure they can work smoothly even with limited staff. The companies which implemented these strategies prior to COVID-19 didn’t suffer during the crisis as much as others, and some even have seen remarkable business growth. Among them are business organizations such as Amazon, which has done very well globally, and Ocado in the UK. The use cases adopted by these companies included such innovations as:

• Remote tracking of trucks
• Real-time path and network flow optimization
• Delay predictions
• Transport cost optimizations
• Autonomous warehouses
• Flexible storage/shelf management,
• Automated guided vehicle robots (AGV) or assisted manual picking up systems