Prof. Matt Wilson began his talk by mentioning some of the commercial ventures that he had been involved in such as Telcoms Cloud in 1997 where the idea had been to provide virtual telecoms. infrastructure such as Fax and messaging services to companies and organisations. This had been the start, for him, of linking remote devices and sending data across the internet rather than using dedicated telephone lines.

 

He then described how he had gone on to work on connecting devices in the medical world providing enhanced services to patients. There had been a process of development starting with home patients taking their own measurements and uploading them to a website through to lightweight monitors attached to the wrist or ankle that can automatically take measurements every few seconds and report them to a monitoring centre 24 hours per day. Such systems allowed patients to be released from hospital to convalesce at home, reducing so-called 'bed blocking'. He was at pains to stress that these systems were additional to, perhaps twice-daily visits by medical staff.

 

As well as monitoring vital signs 'smart' devices could perform such tasks as 'talking' clocks, controlled filling of baths and ensuring bathing water was at a safe temperature. Other monitors provided assurance that the patient was safe by monitoring movement and activities.

 

Clearly these ideas have great potential to take health care into places where it has been hard to deliver in the past, e.g. rural areas, developing countries, prisons, schools, transport systems or the workplace. Equally there are many concerns ranging from loss of privacy, malfunctions and de-humanisation.

 

Prof. Wilson then described how connecting other devices in the home, industry and public infrastructure could also provide benefits from the trivial ordering of detergent through scheduling the arrival of container ships to match the state of tide to minimise crane movements. Again he was able to list some of the benefits, such as improved efficiency, but also raise concerns, particularly over security. He gave instances of threats to power stations as a result of utilities linking simple controllers designed for local operation to Wide-Area Networks and the Internet.

 

He touched on various ideas for home automation that we might consider for ourselves and some of the many cheap controllers that are available and keen youngsters were putting to good use. We were left with the open question, "Do we really need to connect everything?"

 

This was certainly an interesting talk that left much to think about, particularly the human aspects, considering both the good and bad sides of human nature.

 

I was pleased that he mentioned the 'shut off' capabilities built into some 'smart' meters as the IET and others have not given this fact much publicity. Should we ever suffer 'brown outs' in future I assume the 'powers that be' will not be the ones to suffer!

 

Personally I have two main concerns over the drive towards the 'Internet of Things'. The first relates to security as the software industry doesn't have good form on this; the 'hardware' designer builds a strong castle wall and then puts in the essential gate that is well protected; the 'software' designer seems to say "wouldn't it be nice to get in here, here and here! Oh! I didn't realise bad people might want to get in too". The second relates to the pursuit of efficiency, which nominally is 'a good thing'. However efficient systems have poor resilience. A cascade of five '80%' systems has five times 20% of 'slack' that might be 'flexed' or 'pushed' a bit to make up a shortfall. A cascade of four '99.9%' systems is great when it works but it has no margin and WILL fail catastrophically. To these I can perhaps add a third and that is the use of 'Big Data'. There will be 'clever' people devising 'smart' algorithms, forgetting that 'correlation is not causation'. The number of Facebook 'likes' for Justin Bieber might track historic US grain prices but don't use it to bet on our futures please!

 

Useful Links

http://www.profmattwilson.com/ Prof. Wilson’s website
http://www.iotvine.com/ A social network for IoT (it needs you!)

 
https://connect.innovateuk.org/web/dallas/mi-liverpool1 The medical Mi ‘Dallas’ scheme
https://www.lora-alliance.org/what-is-lora/technology Low power battery WLAN
http://home.hit.no/~hansha/?page=home Home automation with Rasp Pi/Arduino etc.

 
http://ixliverpool.net/ Liverpool argues for a beyond-London ‘internet exchange’
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/02/sleepwalking_towards_digital_disaster/ The dangers of connecting ‘everything’