Assignment 5

INTERNET OF
THINGS

Rayan Mezouel
2IBM05

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Table of Contents
Introduction.......................................................................................................................2
What effect does IoT have on our daily lives?.....................................................................3
Who is going to benefit from IoT?......................................................................................4
What is the biggest risk associated with IoT?.....................................................................6
What will happen in terms of jobs losses and skills as IoT makes devices and robots more
intelligent?.........................................................................................................................7
Will IoT impact sustainability?...........................................................................................8
Conclusion.........................................................................................................................9
Bibliography....................................................................................................................10

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Introduction
Let me start by stating the definition of the internet of things. “The Internet of Things (IoT)
describes physical objects embedded with sensors and actuators that communicate with
computing systems via wired or wireless networks—allowing the physical world to be
digitally monitored or even controlled.” (What Is the Internet of Things?, 2022).

The internet of things (IoT) is a much talked about topic that is a big part of our daily lives. In
this report I will discuss 5 questions: what effect it has on our daily lives, who is going to
benefit from IoT, what the biggest risks associated with IoT are, who will govern IoT and how
IoT will impact sustainability.

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What effect does IoT have on our daily lives?
IoT has a significant impact on our daily lives in multiple ways.

Smart homes use IoT devices, these can make our lives at home more convenient. These
devices offer a lot of services and can be controlled through your phone. Security is one of
these services. This includes motion detectors, smart doorbells, cameras, heat detectors and
so on which send you alerts if the security of your house is in danger. If you forgot your keys
for example, you could open the door via the app or if you are not home, this could be done
remotely from anywhere. Security is not the only aspect that will make your life convenient.
The heating and cooling of your house can, the lights, the vacuum cleaner and even the
kitchen utilities can all be linked and controlled through one device while you are sitting in
your sofa and everything can be personalized (Bevis, 2023). Now, you can even start your car
through your phone and already preheat it in the winter. This way, you don’t have to scratch
the ice of your windows before you go to work.

Healthcare will also improve due to the technologies of the IoT. With smartwatches and
fitness tackers for example, people can track their sleep quality, heart rate, steps for the day
and more so they have an idea of how they are doing (Jones, 2023). If there are any changes
in heart rates the devices can alert you and with this data you can get quicker and more
accurate diagnoses of possible diseases (How Does Iot Affect Our Daily Lives - Alibaba Cloud,
2023).

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Who is going to benefit from IoT?
Several industries will benefit from the internet of things. As I have mentioned in the
previous question, healthcare is one of these industries. Other industries are manufacturing,
agriculture, and finance (Airtel Business, 2022).

Looking at the business perspective of healthcare, the hospitals can extend their reach by
collecting patient data while they are home. This makes it more convenient for both doctors
and patients because they do not have to make any trips if it is not urgent or life threatening.
IoT will revolutionize healthcare. Smart beds for example can sense which position the
patients have to be in and can adjust to the perfect angle without the help of nurses. It will
also improve homecare by sending alerts if patients did not take their medications (Meola,
2023). This graph shows an example of how the market is going to expand in Asia Pacific
(Internet of Things [IoT] in Healthcare Market Size & Trends, 2028, n.d.)

For manufacturing, according to Airtel Business (2022), manufacturing will also reap benefits
from the internet of things. Improved production quality is one of these benefits. By having
an improved quality of production, the products and services will have fewer errors which
lead to a reduction of costs. All the information the company receives can be analyzed and
used to streamline their entire processes and again, they can solve problems remotely which
also saves time and money.

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In agriculture, they can start “smart farming”. By utilizing IoT, farmers can start depending
less on human labor while maintaining and even improving the quality of their products. Iot
can assist with the monitoring of their livestock and climate conditions, manage their farms
easier, automate their greenhouse and manage their crops. This will lead to more efficiency,
reduced wastage, resource optimization and more. Eventually, farmers will have to use these
technologies to stay competitive (Sushree, 2023). As you can see on the graph, the market
for robots for example will increase significantly (Appinventiv, 2023).

The last industry I will discuss is finance. This also benefits from all the information that can
be gathered through technologies. Banks for example are using IoT to keep up with the rapid
pace of the digital world. They can use it to track customer behavior, to improve security, to
streamline their customer service and to offer more personalized products. The more data
they can gather, the better their services can be (Kristoffer, 2023).

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What is the biggest risk associated with IoT?
The internet of things has its benefits but does come with a risk of being hacked. There are
multiple ways in which IoT devices could be hacked.

There are a few common types of cyber-attacks. Physical attacks by plugging in a USB stick
into the device, brute force attacks which means that a program keeps guessing passwords
until it gets access to the device, data interception and a couple more. Reasons that can
cause being hacked are poor data protection, poor password protection, unpatched devices
and poor IoT devices management (“Types of IoT Cyber Risks | Agio,” 2022).

You don’t have to fear being hacked now, because there are multiple options to protect the
devices from being hacked. Changing your default password and settings is a good start. By
disabling access and connectivity features you do not need, there will be a smaller chance of
hackers finding a security gap. Multi-factor authentication also is a good choice to protect
yourself from hackers. This is easy to use and extremely safe because most hackers will not
bother putting in effort due to the high level of difficulty multi-factor authentication causes.
Keeping the software updated and using a strong Wi-Fi encryption are also recommended to
shield of cyber-attacks (Newton, 2023).

The market segment of cyber solutions is still growing because there still is no complete
guarding against cyber-attacks and vulnerabilities of IoT devices (Statista, n.d.).

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What will happen in terms of jobs losses and skills as IoT makes
devices and robots more intelligent?
New technologies will broaden the spectrum of tasks and jobs machines can undertake and
has the potential to produce significantly greater worker displacement and inequality than
previous generations of automation. This will certainly make a lot of jobs disappear (Holzer,
2022).

According to an article written by Jack Kelly for Forbes 25% of jobs will be negatively
impacted over the next 5 years and a prediction of Goldman Sachs predicted that AI will
impact 300 million jobs. The CEO of IBM recently announced that he will stop the hiring
process for jobs that can be replaced by AI, which includes administrative jobs (Kelly, 2023).

To contradict this, if you look back at history, it is normal to fear losing your job. But even
though new technology might replace jobs, it has always created new ones (McClelland,
2023). Upgrading and learning new skills will be important if employees do not want to lose
their jobs. I went to a seminar about the future of work by Peter Brandstätter this year and
he also gave an example about the banking industry and AI. 98% of the processes in the
banking industry can be automated and real persons will only work there for the real tricky
questions. So, AI will not be able to replace everything a human can do but definitely a lot.

(Gitnux, 2023)

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Will IoT impact sustainability?

Mathur, V. (2022, December 5). How does IoT help in Environmental Sustainability? |
Analytics Steps. https://www.analyticssteps.com/blogs/how-does-iot-help-environmental-
sustainability

The internet of things will impact environmental sustainability in a positive way. Smart
energy systems help to reduce energy costs and carbon emissions. Wireless utility meters
can also provide to monitor and optimize energy consumption to be environmentally
sustainable. The air quality can be monitored by using IoT sensors, which is important
because poor air quality can have bad consequences for food and water for example. The
sensors can also aid managers in their combat against waste and garbage collection by
providing real-time data of the amount of waste in their containers. This also leads to a
reduction of the carbon footprint by preventing unnecessary trips of trucks for half-full
containers (Mathur, 2022).

IoT can play an essential role in the establishment of a circular economy. In the
manufacturing industry for example, IoT sensors can track the lifecycle of machines by
collecting condition data. With this data, companies can track when maintenance is needed
for these machines precisely which will lead to an increase of the lifecycle (Driving
Sustainability Breakthroughs With the IoT | Interact, n.d.). IoT enables people to make more
informed decisions and will have a big impact on improving sustainability in the future.

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Conclusion
From this report, you could conclude that the internet of things will keep growing and play a
key role in our daily lives. It makes it more convenient and efficient, but you could also say
that humanity will become lazier due to these easy daily life solutions. Several industries will
have a lot of benefits from incorporating IoT in their business processes and it can help
improving sustainability in many ways, so it has its benefits. But there are always two sides
to a story, IoT comes with risks too. Cybersecurity will play an important role to mitigate the
damage of hacking and other cyber-attacks on the IoT devices. Overall, it seems like it has
more benefits than risk and even if we want to, it will be difficult to ignore the changing
world and the rise of the internet of things.

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Bibliography
 Bevis, R. (2023, April 19). 7 Examples of IoT in Everyday Life. CBT Nuggets.

Retrieved May 24, 2023, from

https://www.cbtnuggets.com/blog/technology/networking/seven-examples-of-iot-in-

everyday-life

 Jones, J. (2023, March 15). Importance of Internet of Things in Our Daily Lives.

www.linkedin.com. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/importance-internet-things-our-

daily-lives-jon-jones/

 How Does Iot Affect Our Daily Lives - Alibaba Cloud. (2023, January 17). Alibaba

Cloud. Retrieved May 24, 2023, from

https://www.alibabacloud.com/topic-center/lot/4ktlb6z6xaw-how-does-iot-affect-our-

daily-lives

 Meola, A. (2023, January 12). IoT Healthcare in 2023: Companies, medical devices,

and use cases. Insider Intelligence. https://www.insiderintelligence.com/insights/iot-

healthcare/#:~:text=The%20IoT%20enables%20healthcare%20providers,sit%20down

%20with%20a%20physician.

 Airtel Business. (2022, July 14). Top 5 Industries Benefiting from the Infusion of IoT

Applications. Airtel B2B Blog. https://www.airtel.in/blog/business/top-5-industries-

benefiting-from-iot-applications/

 Sushree. (2023). Key Benefits of IoT in Agriculture & Smart Farming. Divami | Blog.

https://www.divami.com/blog/key-benefits-of-iot-in-agriculture-smart-farming

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  Kristoffer. (2023, January 16). How IoT drives the future of banking services and the

Fintech Industry - Stefanini. Stefanini. https://stefanini.com/en/insights/how-iot-

drives-banking-services-and-fintech-industry

 Mathur, V. (2022, December 5). How does IoT help in Environmental Sustainability?

| Analytics Steps. https://www.analyticssteps.com/blogs/how-does-iot-help-

environmental-sustainability

 Viniak, V. (2023). How IoT helps environmental, social and governance goals. IoT

Agenda. https://www.techtarget.com/iotagenda/post/How-IoT-helps-environmental-

social-and-governance-goals

 Driving sustainability breakthroughs with the IoT | Interact. (n.d.). Interact.

https://www.interact-lighting.com/en-us/iot-insights/driving-sustainability-

breakthroughs

 Newton, E. (2023, February 24). What are the Best Ways to Protect IoT Devices from

Attack? Revolutionized. https://revolutionized.com/protect-iot-devices-from-attack/

 Holzer, H. J. (2022, March 9). Understanding the impact of automation on workers,

jobs, and wages. Brookings.

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2022/01/19/understanding-the-impact-of-

automation-on-workers-jobs-and-wages/

 Kelly, J. (2023, May 2). Artificial Intelligence Is Already Causing Disruption And Job

Losses At IBM And Chegg. Forbes.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2023/05/02/artificial-intelligence-is-already-

causing-disruption-and-job-losses-at-ibm-and-chegg/?sh=884c37375a4f

 PCMag. (2023, April 11). The Best Smart Home Devices for 2023. PCMAG.

https://www.pcmag.com/picks/the-best-smart-home-devices

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  Appinventiv. (2023, March 3). 14 Ways IoT is Impacting the Food & Agriculture

Industry. https://appinventiv.com/blog/iot-in-agriculture-industry/

 Gitnux. (2023). How AI is Replacing Jobs 2023: A Look at the Statistics • GITNUX.

GITNUX. https://blog.gitnux.com/ai-replacing-jobs-statistics/

 Statista. (n.d.). Cyber Solutions - Worldwide | Statista Market Forecast.

https://www.statista.com/outlook/tmo/cybersecurity/cyber-solutions/

worldwide#revenue

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