In a factory environment, collecting data to gain useful insights from various sources is challenging because it requires connecting to many different types of automation systems, plcs and devices that often speak different languages. This is the problem that German industrial software company, inray (specialized in data communication between software systems and components in Industry 4.0, IoT and IIoT) set out to solve for its customers.

Five worthy reads is a regular column on five noteworthy items we’ve discovered while researching trending and timeless topics. Most healthcare facilities already use the Internet of Things (I0T) to make their environment a more efficient and safer place, and this week, we show you how IoT is revolutionizing the healthcare industry. As the world’s population grows, so does the need for quality medical assistance and healthcare.

The IoT, Internet of Things, has arrived. Sensors are everywhere, collecting more and more data about us and the world around us. Temperature, Humidity, Fluid Levels, Traffic counts, the status of devices and things like doors and elevators are being collected and distributed all around us. The question now is "What do we do with all that data?

As we roll into the next decade and IoT becomes commonplace in most organizations, requirements for connectivity will change. Over the last decade of Wi-Fi, we’ve seen a push for faster speeds (high throughput and very high throughput) and recently the ability for greater capacity (high efficiency). Wireless IoT protocols have a different focus. Those requirements are long distance, low power, and flexible architecture. As we consider the next generation, which capabilities rise to the top?

OK, folks. Let’s be real for a moment and acknowledge that everybody, every professional, and definitely every vendor out there is tossing out the phrase “IoT” like flyers on the Las Vegas strip. As an industry, we tend to use IoT to describe a breadth of networked devices, most often headless—those without a user attached—such as cameras, door entry systems, and HVAC controls.

My name is Kat Cosgrove, and I’m a Developer Advocate at JFrog. Before that, I was an engineer on JFrog’s IoT team. Our goal is to bring DevOps to the edge, because it shouldn’t be as difficult to update these kinds of devices as it currently is. In pursuit of this goal, we found a lot of interesting solutions that we could bring into a CI/CD pipeline for embedded Linux devices, and eventually built a rather flashy proof of concept that put several of these solutions on display.

The energy industry used to operate on a simple hub-and-spoke model, in which large power plants would produce energy in a centralized location and distribute it out to consumers. Yet as solar, wind, and other small-scale renewable energy sources take hold in the market, that hub-and-spoke model is being replaced by a complex grid of interconnected devices.

“What would it be like to have an asset monitoring solution that can be installed within minutes and is independent of all existing IT systems, without endangering existing processes?” LineMetrics was founded in 2012 in Haag, Austria, in response to questions just like this one. LineMetrics developed a complete real-time asset monitoring solution delivered through its end-to-end Internet of Things (IoT) platform.

In part 1 we talked about the industrial applications and benefits that 5G and fast compute at the edge will bring to AI products. In part 2 we went deeper into how you can benefit from this new opportunity. In part 3 we focused on the key technical barriers that 5G and Edge compute remove for AI applications. In this part we will summarise the IoT use cases that can benefit from smart cell towers and how they will help businesses focus their efforts on their key differentiating advantage.

(This blog post is part of a 5 part series, titled “How to launch IoT devices”. It will cover the key choices and concerns when turning bright IoT ideas into a product in the market. Sign up to the webinar on how to launch IoT devices to get the full story, all in one place.) First part: Why does IoT take so long? Second part: Select the right hardware and foundations Third part: IoT devices and infrastructure