How The Internet of Everything Will Shape Our Future

We are approaching a moment in our culture where every conceivable man-made object will feature some form of internet connectivity. Whether we’re talking about refrigerators or couches, humanity’s latest goal is to imbue everything with internet. The catch-all phrase that we can use to describe this phenomenon is the Internet of Everything.

More commonly, we have used the adjective “smart” as a prefix before any of these objects to describe their connected status. This is commonly seen with cars, phones, televisions, and so on.

Where will this have an impact beyond providing us with more toys with which to distract ourselves? Our sources suggest that health care will receive a huge impact from this trend. Health care providers, who have an incentive to keep you out of the hospital to keep costs lower, are investing in products that help to track your behavior (e.g. exercise, dieting) and incentivize proper behavior. They are even investing in internet-connected glucose monitoring system for diabetes patients.

By 2020, some think that 220 billion connected devices will be in use across the world. This level of interconnectedness dwarfs our conceptions of the current size of the internet. (That would entail several times as many connected devices as there are humans on the planet.) And, of course, this trend shows no signs of slowing down or stopping.

What potential problems can we predict from this arrangement? As certain individuals have brought to light, there are concerns about the privacy of the content that we have shared online, consciously or not. When the world is connected with this mammoth amount of data, we should try to ensure that privacy will function as it should, and that this information will not be available for the first government or hacker to take advantage of it.

In any event, it’s an exciting time to be alive.

This guest post was written by Steve Bronson in association with Waterline Tank Technologies. They have pioneered an inexpensive and effective way to clean crude oil tanks.  More information can be found at http://www.waterlinellc.com/.