‘The Connected Person’: IoT, Big Data, and the Cloud

Today, cloud-based services typically offer corporate and small, medium enterprise customers a cost-effective and dynamic avenue to large-scale computing, with services offering infrastructure, operating systems and software. The inclusion of the developing concept of Internet of Things (IoT) will be able to provide additional information to these customers for their processing of Big Data from multiple sources such as from devices, sensor networks and social media channels. “Edge” or “fog” computing refers to capabilities being handled on the device end for improved performance. (“Edge” refers to the edge of the device and the cloud.) Proprietary variations on the concept of the IoT already produce new insights for end-users.

In the relatively near future, a standards- and cloud-enabled IoT for service providers will likely also serve “the connected person.” This is already happening to some degree via apps on mobile devices. The personalized cloud for individuals will be populated by devices, software and data that ultimately bring the world to one’s digital doorstep.

This will provide a means to access, monitor and to some extent control one’s digital world, from the home area network to the larger world. Cloud-enabled IoT and associated Big Data processing has implications for healthcare, education, transportation, personal finance – all the industry verticals served today by the Internet. In this vision, cloud-based hardware in conjunction with cloud-based software will capture, share, route, process and visualize information.

3D printing is a good use case to illustrate this point. Information might be drawn from data and software in the cloud and transmitted to a physical machine to create an object. Another use case is wearable medical devices that connect through the cloud to monitoring software for access by medical personnel. This information may be correlated with datasets created from various Big Data sources, e.g., genomic data, clinical drug studies, epidemiological histories. But the concept applies to people obtaining services from nearly any industry vertical, e.g., finance, retail, transportation, education, entertainment. Several IEEE societies are working on various elements of these efforts, perhaps most notably the IEEE Computing Society’s Cloud Computing Initiative, the IEEE IoT Initiative, and the IEEE Big Data Initiative.