The internet of things: convenience at a price

Chores are boring. Get home from work, let the dog out, put dinner on, start a load of laundry and write a list for your next grocery order. What if rather than doing housework when you get home, you could do it on your commute – or better yet, not at all?

That’s the promise of the internet of things: hand your commute over to a smart car, let your pet out via his web-connected dog door, open up an app to pre-heat the oven and start the laundry, and click to approve the shopping list your smart fridge automatically generated.

This all sounds like a futuristic life, and parts of it do remain years away, but the foundations are being laid now – and much of the work is being done by British firms. We need to decide now what the IoT will look like, how it will protect our privacy, and just how much help we really want from it.

What is the internet of things?

The term Internet of Things (commonly shortened to IoT) first emerged in 1999, yet a connected toaster was on show at an internet conference ten years earlier. The term is currently used to describe everything from intelligent thermostats that turn up the heating before you get home to fridges that order milk when you’ve run out and cows fitted with health and location trackers. It’s what happens when sensors, cheap wireless chips and ubiquitous internet connectivity collide: devices can talk to each other, making it easier to control and automate tasks – and collect data.

Want an IoT life? You can start now – but it’ll either take effort or a rather lot of cash.

Those who are handy with technology can programme their own smart devices and control them using Arduino or Raspberry Pi boards, but basic smart home functions are easy to achieve now. Companies such as Belkin and D-Link sell internet connected plugs: pop one into a socket, and whatever you plug into it can be flipped on or off via an app, either remotely or on a set schedule. Connecting a single socket will cost about £40.

Philips Hue is a smart light that can be turned on remotely or used as a timed wake-up light. It’s easy to install – screw them in and open the app – but the starter kit costs £179, and each bulb £25.

Lars Kurkinen, a senior analyst at Berg Insight, said smart thermostats are the most popular connected home device in Britain. “British Gas’ Hive is the largest with more than 150,000 users now, but there are of course a large number of other companies competing in this space as well such as Nest, Tado, Honeywell and Heat Genius,” he said.

Not easy, and not cheap

Indeed, many existing IoT products have very specific goals: PetziConnect ($170) lets you interact with a pet over camera and feed them a treat, Withings Scales track your weight and body fat, and the Firefox iKettle starts boiling water for a cuppa when your morning alarm sounds. And then there are appliances. LG has shown off a smart refrigerator that you can send a text message to, asking it if there’s any milk in the fridge. It’ll cost £2,000, but isn’t yet available in the UK.

Most of these are standalone products, and one challenge for the IoT is bringing it all together into a single platform, as no one wants to open a new app for each appliance, smart lamp, and so on. Homey, from Dutch developers Athom, hopes to pull it all together by allowing you to talk to your home; you can set phrases that let you control your lights, music and TV. Along similar lines, Amazon has unveiled the Echo speaker, which uses voice recognition to give you answers to basic questions as well as add items to a shopping list, set an alarm and play music.

There’s more holding back IoT. Berg analyst Kurkinen said smart devices would be more useful to consumers if they got along better. Such interoperability would mean that as you “leave your home and lock your front door, your door lock could tell your thermostat to switch to ‘away mode’ and turn off the lights,” he noted. “Quite frankly, however, there are very many standards and initiatives related to interoperability and it is often difficult for consumers to tell if two smart home products will be interoperable or not.”

“Smart home products still need to improve in terms of usability and the value that is delivered to consumers,” Kurkinen said. “One challenge is that using smart home products often requires a fair bit of fiddling with your phone to get the settings right. A future trend is to minimise the number of settings and controls that are required to enable ‘true’ home automation.”

And don’t forget the cost of those £25 light bulbs. “Currently there are countless potential applications of IoT that are not being realised because the technology is not there yet or it’s too expensive,” added Maurizio Pilu, partnerships director at Digital Catapult, a technology accelerator funded by the Technology Strategy Board.

Smart security

There are other challenges with the IoT, notably around security and privacy. It’s handy to be able to unlock your door from a distance, but not so convenient if a burglar can do the same. As F-Secure product manager Mika Majapuro noted, hackers have already broken into baby monitors and webcams. In the future, hackers could crack your smart door lock remotely and sell access to local thieves, he suggested, or take over your fridge and demand a ransom to get it back. “It sounds like a strange concept, but would you prefer to pay £50 to get your fridge or freezer working again or hundreds of pounds on replacing the food and buying a new appliance?” he asked.

Is there anything IoT users can do? “Essentially, consumers are in over their heads on this one,” said Stahlberg. “Just as with cars, there should be independent tests and reviews – and perhaps certification or vetting [such as] ‘crash test dummy tests’ for products.”

Invasion of privacy

And then there’s privacy. We already face online surveillance – what happens when even our home appliances add to the pool of personal data collected about us? “As the market is still at a very early stage, a lot of the cool IoT devices we see today are made by startups or at least fast moving teams within bigger companies,” warned Mika Stahlberg, director of strategic threat research at F-Secure. “These kinds of teams typically are very driven and focused on getting their product to the market fast, and tend to travel light. This means that it’s likely there might be some cutting of corners when it comes to selecting which customer data to upstream, how the data is stored, who gets access and how product security has been implemented.”

Again, that means privacy isn’t always in users’ hands. Lilian Edwards, professor of e-governance at Strathclyde University – which is running a conference on the subject later this week in Glasgow – pointed out that’s the downside of private companies, especially when they’re developing IoT products to be used city-wide. “What’s happening with smart cities is that, increasingly, the data that’s generated within them may be from public spaces but may belong to private companies.”

Because of the threat to privacy, the EU needs to ensure its data protection laws reflect the changes brought in by the IoT, and both Edwards and Stahlberg called for privacy to be built in at the design stage of IoT products and platforms – not be left as an afterthought.

British building blocks

The Internet of Things doesn’t have to mean letting Silicon Valley in through your remotely unlocked door: British companies, from established players to startups, are already making a mark. “The UK has the potential to be a world leader in the IoT, largely because the country has outstanding capabilities in communications technology and cyber security,” said Pilu.

He pegged a few firms to watch, starting with ARM, the British chip designer responsible for most smartphone and tablet processors. “London-based Evrythng is another great example of UK-based innovation in the IoT. Creating a platform connecting normal consumer products, from boilers to lamps, to the web allows real-time data to drive applications and manage them,” he added. “Organisations that have been showcased at the Digital Catapult Centre are really showing the potential for the UK around the IoT – from sensors by Beacontent and NWave through to CanaryCare and Kemuri showing the true social benefits of the IoT, as well as thingful that maps the interactions and scale of IoT as it grows.”

Across Europe, he pointed to French firm Sigfox, which is building an EU-wide, low-power network using unlicensed spectrum – perfect for connecting IoT devices and sensors. “For the IoT to reach its full potential being connected is key, and with the 3G spectrum at capacity and 4G rapidly filling up, tapping into unlicensed spectrum is a disruptive but necessary move,” Pilu added.

In the future

Despite the many challenges – from interoperability to price, security and privacy – analysts are expecting an explosion in IoT. Gartner says 4.9bn connected “things” will be in use by this year, reaching 25bn by 2020.

So what will it look like in the future? Your ride home will be via a driverless car (already being trialled in Milton Keynes), your home temperature, meals and other chores will be taken care of by the time you walk in your remotely unlocked front door, your lighting will turn on in warm colours to welcome you home, and your music playlist will follow you from the car to the living room – and, hopefully, all this will happen across one interoperable system with privacy baked in from the design stage.

But the future of IoT may be impossible to predict. Edwards noted her amused surprise at one group presenting at the University of Strathclyde’s conference in Glasgow, which will be showing off smart bathrooms that measure everything from your water consumption to how you use your toothpaste, highlighting the reach of the IoT. “It’s not science fiction anymore,” she added.