One more Thing: Podcast ‘We Talk IoT’

For more than a year, the team at Smart Industry, the IoT Business Magazine, has been hosting a monthly series of podcasts called ‘We Talk IoT’. These consist of interviews with experts in the various areas of IoT who have something really important to say.

The podcast covers a wide range of topics ranging from IoT infrastructure to autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence, predictive analysis and cybersecurity. It is sponsored by Microsoft Azure and features on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Sound-Cloud to reach an average audience of 5,000 to 6,000 listeners per month. We encourage our interview guests to link to the podcast from their own websites and social media platforms to boost overall listenership. If you would like to hear it, you can find it avnet-silica.com/podcast. Every issue of We Talk IoT concludes with a short editorial item of interest which we call One More Thing. As of now, the editors will get to choose their favourite installments to share here at the end of our print edition.

Foresolution

Where’s the Loo? IoT Flushes It Out

One of the most challenging jobs for IoT technologies is real-time tracking of goods and assets at remote locations, even when they lack a power source. Portable toilets are a good example. They’re usually tucked away well out of sight (and smell) and sometimes the only way to find them is to send out a search party. Foresolutions, a UK technology company, thinks it’s found a better way to locate and check the status of such hard-to-find assets as porta potties, construction tools and air-traffic equipment, just to name a few. The company is providing battery-powered IoT devices along with its own software for managing non-powered items in outdoor working environments.

Mobile Expandable Wellbeing Unit: Compacting to a 4ft (1.2 m) cube, the MEWU fits onto a standard rail trolley or trailer anywhere on track for deployment at the point of work. These often include seats of ease, euphemistically called Mobile Expandable Wellbeing Units, or MEWUs (pronounced ‘mews’). These are typically bright orange, interconnecting boxes placed at railway or building construction sites. They contain removable wastewater tanks and compartments for additional safety equipment such as defibrillators and first-aid gear. The units cost lots of money and are mostly left to fend for themselves out somewhere in the boondocks.

Thanks to battery-powered sensors and wireless connectivity, Foresolutions helps railroads and construction companies keep track of their units, tell whether they are being used and when to call in maintenance. In addition, the company has deployed several thousand IoT devices at Heathrow Airport to keep track of various non-motorised assets – tools, steps, tugs and other equipment – in order to help man-agement understand their utilisation and to locate equipment when needed.

Live Long and Prosper!Ultra-rugged long-life battery-powered GPS devices like this one from Digicore offer up to seven years of asset tracking, theft recovery, and more. (source ©: Digital Matter)

Throughout the past year, Foresolutions has been partnering with Australia’s Digital Matter, which makes battery-powered sensors that leverage wireless networks – including LTE, GSM, WiFi and Bluetooth – to forward data to the cloud, no matter where the sensor is deployed. On the mobile toilets, the company is using Digital Matter’s Oyster 2 sensor devices, powered by three AA batteries, to update companies with the information they need to man-age the units.

IoT Everywhere: IoT solutions in facility management can fullfil multipile roles at once, for instance building & structure monitoring, tem-perature, air quality, presence, occupancy, energy, noise, door opening, weather and environmental conditions, people tracking, safe distancing, as well as security & access control and CCTV. (source ©: Foresolutions)

Traditionally, this type of data cannot be accessed without a human visiting the station. Foresolutions’ system can detect not only the GPS location but also such conditions as the opening and closing of doors, vibration, temperature and humidity changes, as well as water, ice and other outdoor conditions. Any changes in location or sensor readings, such as tilting or moving, are forwarded to the headquarters so those in charge of the stations can tell if they are being moved. After all, these units cost a lot of money and theft is not unknown.

IoT data keeps units sanitised and well-maintained.

_{Tom Ross, Foresolutions}

IoT data also helps to ensure that the units are sanitised and well-maintained, says Tom Ross, Foresolutions’ managing director. He has plans to expand his solutions beyond mobile loos, as they’re called in the UK, to include such markets as farms, factories, hospitals and shopping centres or even amusement parks.

Sharkeye

AI Drones Track and Protect Great White Sharks

Academics from the University of California and San Diego State have teamed up with AI researchers from Salesforce to create software that can spot sharks swimming around popular beach sites. SharkEye, as the system is called, uses drones to spot sharks from above. The unmanned flying vehicles follow pre-programmed paths at a height of around 120 feet (36.5 metres) to cover large areas of the ocean without disturbing marine life. The goal of SharkEye is eventually to produce automated ‘shark reports’ for beachgoers to help them assess levels of risk.

The researchers hope this application of AI can help keep beaches safer, encourage a more informed public and help people learn how to share the waves with wildlife. Perhaps, most importantly, the system could help protect the gradually improving populations of great white sharks, top predators that are a healthy part of the California ocean ecosystem, says Doug McCauley, director of the Benioff Ocean Initiative and a professor at the University of California Santa Barbara.

Shark Alarm! The dashboard created for the SharkEye project at Santa Barbara’s Parado Beach is meant to openly share data insights on sharks collected from drone-based arial surveys as well as acoustic detections. Both are shown on a current-day and a seven-day rolling average.The latter provide a clearer picture of trends in abundance compared to expected variation in daily peaks and dips in shark activity. Absence of shark sightings or acoustic signals are not an indicator that no sharks are present – in California’s costal waters, they almost always are. (source ©: Marine Science Institute, UC Santa Barbara, Salesforce.com, San Diego State University)

Salesforce AI is using its proprietary Einstein Vision algorithm – ordinarily used for visual search, brand detection and product identification – to process drone video and recognise the unique attributes of sharks, thereby identifying them without the need for physical tagging. This information will then be shared with local officials and beachside communities, so, without ever touching the water, SharkEye can make sure it’s safe for the rest of us to hop in!

Fraunhofer

Many Still Wait for 5G – but 6G is Just Around the Corner

Most smartphone owners are still waiting for 5G to appear but the telco industry is already gearing up for the next step. The starting pistol for this next generation of mobile communications, 6G, has already been fired.

“With 6G, we have the ambitious goal of achieving data rates of terabits per second and a latency of about 100 microseconds – that’s 50 times the data rate and one-tenth the latency of 5G,” says Ivan Ndip, an expert on antennas and radio frequency systems at the Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration (IZM) in Berlin.

Ndip uses autonomous driving to explain the difference. The goal here, he says, is to reduce the number of accidents. 5G has a maximum data rate of about 20 gigabits per second – nowhere near enough to communicate a car’s position to other road users in real time, much less to measure distances and scan through 360 degrees at the same time. The self-driving car needs to be able to look far into the distance while also focusing on close-up things. For this, autonomous vehicles require sensors that combine both radar and cameras, and need to be able to collect enormous amounts of data and share them simultaneously. According to Ndip, Fraunhofer IZM is currently developing such sensors.

The car must also react instantly to unforeseen circumstances, so, in addition to very high data rates, the sensors must exhibit extremely low latency. Ndip says, 5G just doesn’t cut it. He adds that 5G is still missing a couple of critical components as well as the network intelligence necessary to handle true hands-off autonomous driving.

“That’s why we need 6G,” the scientist maintains. Although 6G will not be operational until at least 2030, Ndip believes that governments and telcos need to start investing in the new technology now. Hardware still needs to be developed for mobile communications above 100 GHz but, for most manufacturers, this is terra incognita as they have never worked with frequencies like these before. Typically, researchers and developers need a ten-year head start for this kind of mammoth project, Ndip says. Setting the necessary specifications and standards alone will take at least five years, he believes.

The goal here is to reduce the number of traffic accidents.

_{Ivan Ndip, Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration (IZM) in Berlin}

Fraunhofer recently opened its 6G Innovation Campus in Cottbus – the so-called iCampus – where it plans to do research into new networking and sensor technologies, together with the local university and two separate Leibnitz Institutes. The future of mobile communications, it seems, just can’t happen fast enough.

Myant

A New ‘Brief’ in Health Monitoring

Underwear is getting a lot smarter these days. Myant, an innovator in wearables, has developed a smart pair of briefs that could potentially transform healthcare. Biometric sensors woven into the fabric of the underwear can measure things like sleep quality, activity, stress levels, temperature and heart condition, to provide some of the most reliable and effective ways to detect and prevent health issues, the company claims.

Smart Dessous: Myant’s new Skiin brand textiles monitor their owner’s vital functions and sleeping habits and can even wake up sleepy drivers before they doze off at the wheel.

The Skiin brand fabric sends data to a corresponding app and onwards to the cloud platform which analyses the data to provide guidance on lifestyle changes and the information can, with permission, be shared with healthcare providers. Underwear is a good choice for a smart garment because it makes consistent, close contact with the body – a must-have for continuous skin sensors.

Myant’s underwear innovation fits into the larger trend of e-textiles and smart clothing, powered by artificial intelligence and tiny semiconductor technology. Scientists are attempting to replace clunky ECGs and health monitoring de-vices, like watches and chest straps, with comfortable smart garments.

Healthcare providers and develop-ers believe advances like these will increase compliance and lead to better health outcomes. Smart garments will probably be able to do much more for us. Sensors can now be embedded directly into textiles – similar to weaving additional yarn into an existing piece of fabric – or by applying sensors to the top of the fabric. Either way, the use cases for e-textiles go far beyond health monitoring. Smart garments can to do things like:

• diagnose comfort levels of ampu-tees by monitoring their interaction with their artificial limb.
• assess patterns in athletes’ performances and deliver small electric shocks to underperforming muscles.
• wake up sleepy drivers on the road before accidents occur, using built-in fatigue monitoring.
• connect to smart home systems to do things like changing the thermostat when your body is cold (or hot).

The latest report by research firm IDTechE predicts that smart textiles will be worth over $1.4 billion by 2030. The number of potential applications and markets for e-textiles is vast, including military and space, automotive, haptic suits for virtual reality, sports and fitness, and assis-tive clothing.

Kerlink

Windmills Push Spread of Public IoT Services

Like many others along the Neth-erlands North Sea coast, the Port of Moerdijk has a large wind farm. The farm was installed in 2020 and is operated by Vattenfall, a European green energy specialist. The wind farm supplies 27 megawatts of clean energy to more than 27,000 households. But officials soon realised the turbine towers could serve an additional purpose by hosting an IoT network to provide key sensor data to the bustling port 120 metres below. IoT networking company Kerlink was commissioned to create the gateways for the LoRaWAN project.

The Kerlink Wirnet iStation receives sensor data and information from within a radius of 25 kilometres and securely transfers it to users of the energy-efficient IoT network. This includes monitoring air quality, CO2 emissions, water levels and de-tecting whether bridges and gates around the port are open or closed, which helps move traffic more efficiently while reducing emissions.

The wind industry could be crucial to building the public Internet of Things.

_{Aurélien Seugnet , Kerlink}

In addition, the industrial-grade IoT network will be available at low cost for organisations near the port in shipping, rail and other industries as well as to municipalities, government agencies and individuals.

Smart Station: The Kerlink Wirnet iStation receives sensor data and information from within a radius of 25 km and can monitor air quality addition. (source ©: Kerlinkin)

Aurélien Seugnet, Kerlink’s business developer, is happy with the results so far. “The wind industry could become a crucial building block in the public Internet of Things,” he believes. “We usually use high buildings and pylons [as mounting points],” he added – so why not use turbine towers? The height of the towers means the signal is stronger and can reach further. Besides which, piggybacking on a wind generator does away with the constant need to change batteries.

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