The Three Things the Internet of Things Connects to the Internet

In the internet of things, everything connected to the internet falls into three categories:

1. Things that collect and send information

These are sensors. Sensors can be temperature sensors, motion sensors, humidity sensors, air quality sensors, light sensors (name whatever you like). These sensors and connections let us collect information from the environment automatically, enabling smarter decisions.

On a farm, automatically obtaining information about soil moisture tells the farmer exactly when watering is needed. The farmer can ensure the right amount of irrigation rather than too much (overusing irrigation systems and wasting water is very expensive) or too little (potentially losing much of the crop). More money for the farmer, more food for the world! Just as our sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste let we humans understand the world, sensors let machines understand it.

2. Things that receive information and act

We are all familiar with machines that take information and act on it. Your printer receives a document and prints it. Your car receives a signal from the key fob and the doors open. The examples are endless. Whether simply sending an “open” command or, more complexly, sending a 3D model to a 3D printer, we know we can tell machines what to do from a distance. So what? The internet of things can satisfy both conditions at once, and that is where it truly works: things that both collect and send information and receive information and act on it.

3. Things that do both

Let’s quickly return to the farming example. The sensor can collect soil moisture information to tell the farmer how much to water, but the farmer is not actually needed. Instead, the irrigation system can switch on automatically according to soil moisture.

You can go further. If the irrigation system receives weather information through its internet connection, it also knows when rain is coming and decides not to water the crops today, since the rain will do it anyway. And it goes beyond that! You can collect all the information about soil moisture, how the irrigation system watered, and how the crops actually grew, and send it to supercomputers running amazing algorithms that make sense of it. That is just one sensor. Combined with other sensors for light, air quality and temperature, the algorithms can learn far more. Collecting this information across thousands of farms, the algorithms can provide incredible insights into how to grow crops best, helping feed the world’s growing population.

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