Why IoT is a force for good, not just for profit
Quectel’s new white paper provides numerous examples of how organizations across sectors are demonstrating how IoT is a force for good
IoT is delivering on its promise to build not only a smarter world but a safer, healthier and more sustainable society. A newly-published white paper from Quectel reveals how IoT is impacting society across a broad and diverse range of projects. These range from satellite modules that are connecting the unconnected to agriculture apps that are increasing crop yields to fight starvation or medical services that are shortening waiting lists and systems that are reducing environmental damage.
Often, in the rush to focus on profitability, technology innovation and market competition, these IoT benefits are overlooked but the paper celebrates how IoT is enabling transformative change – for good. By enabling an optimized approach to design, development, distribution and manufacturing, IoT is helping products to have a positive impact while minimizing energy consumption, environmental impacts and costs for the end user.
Devices can now readily contain appropriate computing power or be connected to remote or edge compute resources. These advances have opened up huge potential for low value, high volume deployments in revenue-constrained situations as well as ultra-high performance offerings for high value services such as medical imaging.
Why IoT is a force for good
The development of IoT itself has further positioned IoT technologies to support society and make everyone’s lives better. Greater understanding of how to efficiently design, manufacture, deploy and operate IoT devices has made IoT suitable for a wider range of applications and use cases than ever before. These range from simple tracking apps to keep lone workers safe to monitoring patients’ consumption of medicines or low-cost sensor networks to ensure maximized crop yields.
All of this has been achieved by the rapidly maturing IoT ecosystem which has invested heavily and put in sustained effort over the last two decades. Technologies that would previously only have been affordable for high-value applications have now commoditized, and the combination of low cost technology with high efficiency design, development, manufacture and distribution are driving IoT’s applicability into new areas.
The result is that solutions can now be deployed into low GDP markets at volume, thereby multiplying the positive impacts IoT can have on society in general. IoT has never been an elitist technology looking to only serve high value industries in wealthy nations. IoT is for the world’s population and the next decade will demonstrate this even more clearly how IoT can be a force for good.