The Universal World of IoT – Part II

Recently, we discussed IOT as it relates to various purposes in our lives at work and home. Today’s post is a continuation of this content, with a focus on the medical and farming industries. As a reminder, IoT is about internet-connected devices such as home appliances, vehicles, hospital equipment, small and large scale industrial machinery and other physical devices. The three components of IoT are:

1. Internet as the medium, or communication method
2. “Things” (objects / devices) known as hardware
3. Software

These devices are interconnected over networks along with required software, actuators, sensors, and network connectivity.

Each of these devices are uniquely identified over the network and exchange data between one another.

Healthcare:

IoT empowers healthcare professionals to use their knowledge and training in a better way to solve problems. It helps them utilize better data and equipment that in turn supports more precise and swift actions. IoT allows in the professional development of healthcare professionals because they practically exercise their talent rather than spending time on administrative tasks.

Medical Information Distribution:

This is a most prominent innovation of IoT applications in healthcare, the distribution of accurate and current information to patients remains one of the most challenging concerns of medical care.

IoT systems take healthcare out of facilities like hospitals and allow intrusive care into the office, home or social space. They empower and enable individuals to cater to their own health, and allow healthcare providers to deliver better care to patients.

As a result, this has resulted and paved way for fewer accidents that usually result from miscommunication, improved patient satisfaction, and better preventive care.

Emergency Care:

The emergency support services have always had the problem of suffering from limited resources and getting disconnected with the base facility. The advanced automation and analytics of IoT cater to this problem in the healthcare sector. An emergency can be analyzed from a far distance or rather miles away. The providers get access to the patient profiles way before their arrival because of which they can deliver essential care to the patients on time. In this way, associated losses are reduced, and emergency health care is improved.

Agriculture:

The Internet of Things (IoT) has the potential to transform the ways we live in the world, the ever-growing global population would touch around 9.6 billion by 2050. So, to feed this immense population, the agriculture industry needs to embrace IoT.

The demand for more food has to meet overcoming challenges such as, rising climate change, extreme weather conditions and environmental impact that results from intensive farming practices.

Smart farming through the use of IoT technologies will help farmers to reduce generated wastes and enhance productivity.

That can come from the quantity of fertilizer that has been utilized to the number of journeys the farm vehicles have made.

Precision Farming:

Precision farming is a process or a practice that makes the farming procedure more accurate and controlled for raising livestock and growing of crops. The use of IT and items like sensors, autonomous vehicles, automated hardware, control systems, robotics, etc in this approach are key components.

The products and services offered by IoT systems include soil moisture probes, VRI optimization, and virtual optimizer PRO, and so on. VRI (Variable Rate Irrigation) optimization is a process that maximizes the profitability on irrigated crop fields with soil variability, thereby improving yields and increasing water use efficiency.

Agriculture Drones:

Agricultural drones are a very good example of IoT applications in Agriculture. Agriculture industries today, have become one of the major industries where drones can incorporate. Two types of drones, that is, ground-based and aerial-based drones are being incorporated in agriculture in many ways such as, for crop health assessment, irrigation, planting, and soil & field analysis.

Livestock Monitoring:

IoT applications help farmers to collect data regarding the location, well-being, and health of their cattle. This information helps them in identifying the condition of their livestock. Such as, finding animals that are sick so, that they can separate from the herd, preventing the spread of the disease to the entire cattle. The feasibility of ranchers to locate their cattle with the help of IoT based sensors helps in bringing down labour costs by a substantial amount.