IoT narrows the divide between humans and machines

The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to a future world where all types of electronic devices link to each other via the Internet. Today, it’s estimated that there are nearly 10 billion devices in the world connected to the Internet, a figure expected to triple to nearly 30 billion by 2020.

According to industry analysts at Gartner, as machines become “smarter” and begin automating more human tasks, people will need to trust the machines, while also maintaining a feeling of safety. As such, the technologies that make up the Internet of Things (IoT) will be tasked with providing increased visibility into how machines are operating and the environmental situation they are operating in.

“For example, IBM’s Watson provides ‘confidence’ scores for the answers it provides to humans while Baxter shows a confused facial expression on its screen when it does not know what to do,” Gartner analysts explained in a recent company post. “MIT has also been working on Kismet, a robot that senses social cues from visual and auditory sensors, and responds with facial expressions that demonstrate understanding. These types of technology are very important in allowing humans and machines to work together.”

In addition, the analysts noted that machines and systems can only benefit from a better understanding of human context, humans and human emotion.

“This understanding leads to simple context-aware interactions, such as displaying an operational report for the location closest to the user; to better understanding customers, such as gauging consumer sentiment for a new product line by analyzing Facebook postings; to complex dialoguing with customers, such as virtual assistants using natural language question and answering to interact on customer inquiries,” the analysts continued.

“The technologies that represent these capabilities include bioacoustic sensing, smart dust, quantified self, brain computer interface, affective computing, biochips, 3D scanners, natural-language question and answering (NLQA), content analytics, mobile health monitoring gesture control, activity streams, biometric authentication methods, location intelligence and speech recognition.”

As previously discussed on Bits & Pieces, Atmel is right at the heart of The Internet of Things, with our technology helping to fuel machine-to-machine (M2M) communications and the industrial Internet.

Interested in reading about the specifics of how Atmel is working to rapidly evolve the Internet of Things? Be sure to check out our wireless solutions, MCU portfolio and our role in building an advanced world of touch for the IoT.