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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

The "Internet of Things" is still rather pointless. I went to an "Internet of Things" meetup in San Francisco last month. All parties defined "IoT" as "controlling something via a smartphone and cloud server". Most of the applications are rather banal. There are smartphone-connected garage door openers.

The speaker for Samsung had some good insights. They have a refrigerator with a touchscreen and Instagram connectivity, which costs more than a regular refrigerator plus an iPad. He said that they saw three classes of customers:

- Those who want the latest thing.

- Those who like to show off their houses to others (the granite-countertop crowd.)

- Those who just have a lot of money and buy the high end version by default.

None of those people are getting this stuff because it's useful in any way. These are decorative objects to them.

If that's the Internet of Things, it's going to be a fad. Granite countertops are so last-year now, you know.

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This has never really been my impression of Internet of Things. The examples you've mentioned seem far too obvious and simplistic. To me, it's far more than scrambling to find the nth device to make smartphone-connected.

I've always looked at IoT as a mesh network of many specialized devices talking to each other to provide an overall context. For instance, speaking from my background: imagine a location sensor on a patient's wrist detecting an iBeacon in a particular ICU room indicating the patient has been upgraded, then triggering their vitals sensors to set to continuous monitoring, then upgrading the alert level for the patient's notifications in a physician's EMR, so on and so forth. In other words, these "Things" act more as specialized sensors, like our ears and eyes, that relay signals onto a digital thalamus/cerebrum where signals are integrated, a context is created, and actions are then taken.

I may be totally off-base here, and perhaps this isn't what Internet of Things is really about. But I hope it is.

So glad you mentioned this. I'm not sure what IoT for consumers looks like beyond text notifications from my smoker, but there are pretty big ramifications on the healthcare scene, and networking disparate units in a meaningful way. Just an example, I've seen several cardiology projects that track a patient from EMT to discharge while providing actionable insight. It's one of the few things in medicine I'm actually hopeful about.

That's an "industrial" application. Manufacturing plants have been heavily networked for decades. Hospitals are going that way, but security is a problem.

I don't runderstand why you would want to have mesh networks at hospitals. It is a controlled environment where you could roll out a centralised infrastructure easily, with all the benefits of management, traceability and accountability that follows.

There is also "Internet" in IoT. I'm not convinced hospital equipment, like many other control systems, really should be Internet accessible.

Disposable things? They need to be zero-configuration or they won't get used/connected at all. A mesh works that way; centralized usually doesn't.

I don't what disposable tech exists in hospitals, but zero-configuration mesh means no authentication, and I think most medical data is far too sensitive for that.

or... automatic authentication

What's the difference? Or did I just have a "whoosh" moment (when a joke went over my head)?

No, you can provision new devices into the network automatically. True somebody could be watching; but if they miss it then the device proceeds with secure data streams.

"Those who like to show off their houses to others (the granite-countertop crowd.)"

These things are are not at all equal.

I rarely have people over; when it comes to socializing I would always rather go to the other person's house. This is less effort on my part (prep, cleanup, etc...). When people do come around I don't care what they think beyond hoping it's not, "Wow what a filthy pig."

I do however have granite counter tops. The up front cost is more, but I'm a stayer, not a mover. My long term cost is less. The counter tops were installed 7 years ago and they look exactly the same today as they did when I moved in. When I die or get sent to the old folks home (hopefully not for another 50+ years) those counters will still be there and look just as good as they do today.

In the long run this is less money and less time and effort since I don't need someone replacing my laminate counter tops every 10 years. They also withstand high temperatures and are more sanitary since they are sealed and don't break down over time (dents, dings, scratches like laminate).

If you were to see my house, what you would find is that it is very plain, but that things inside of it are meant to last.

When I moved in the upstairs flooring was carpet; it was in bad shape; stains, discolored, but I waited 5 years to replace it because I'm cheap. When I did replace it I bought solid wood; I got a finish that was on clearance because it was discontinued. Like the counters, the floor will last the rest of my lifetime, worst case scenario I will have to pay to have it resurfaced once in my entire life span. This is much cheaper than carpet over the long run.

My basement is still carpeting; when I purchased the home the basement carpet was stained so badly and stank so badly of dog urine that it had to be replaced immediately. I was broke from all of the cost of purchasing the home so I had the absolute cheapest carpet installed and it is still there more than 10 years later in bad need of replacement again. When I do replace it, probably next year, I will put in a life time durable tile and be done with it FOREVER.

Buhu, so you bought something for its long term utility that most people by for its bragging rights.

No way is putting the Internet into a watch or say a toilet pointless. The data collected from such things will extend and save our lives.

Send your heart rate to your doctor and or the ability for him or a medical staff to monitor via your watch is invaluable.

A IoT toilet of the future should be able to analyze your specimen data, look for irregularities in it's data based on million of records and notify you to schedule a doctor's appointment.

Samsung is presenting the benefits of IoT terribly wrong it seems.

Isn't the impressive part of automated fecal screening going to be the automated fecal screening and not the radio and data feed for the doctor?

Maybe that will be helped by maintaining millions of records about feces, doctor's visits, prescriptions, OTC supplement/medicine use, diet, genetics, etc. Insert "big data" buzzwords.

Still, it leaves the question of whether it's actually possible, worth it and will be embraced by enough people to work. I'm skeptical.

Nobody seems to be working on a IoT toilet yet or has announced it yet.

It's an idea/thought I've always wanted to work on as I noted above for a few years now.

Overall the cost to create it I'm thinking is enormous and it's not something I or another could create/invent in a garage.

Hate to break it to you, but that's "big in Japan" already.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/07/high-tech-toilet-ta...

Great to hear thanks for pointing this out! Definitely innovation needed to proliferate/become the norm.

Of course there are many ways to skin a cat and no one is doing it here in the US... Yet. The one who does it best and has the biggest Rolodex/bank wins in this much needed space.

How about not just "no", but "hell no"? This is the surveillance era - do you really want the NSA logging a continuous stream of your health data?

There doing that now ... how has it affected your daily life?

Further, If you want to opt out of technology that will extend and save your life that is your choice.

For me my health/extending my life span is more important then privacy. Others may or may not feel the same.

The NSA is not currently logging all my health data because there is no digital stream of health data on the internet which they could intercept. Perhaps they could break into my doctor's files if they cared, but all they'd be able to find would be an occasional snapshot from the occasional checkup. Most of the information present would have to be read and analyzed by a human.

This is very, very different from the situation which would exist in an "internet of things" world in which my toilet, coffeepot, toothbrush, and the like were all snooping on me and streaming their results. By intercepting all this data, which we already know the NSA is constantly doing, it would be possible to automatically construct a statistics-based picture of my health, and that of everyone else around me.

This is incredibly creepy, fucked up, wrong, and not even a little bit OK.

I would like to add that this does not stop with the NSA. I would not be even the slightest bit more comfortable with Apple or Facebook doing it.

A smart toilet is not going to save you from cancer--don't bandy about this idea that things like that clearly are a good idea.

Blood in your stool in tiny amounts is a indicator of colon cancer.

And of other things, like hemorrhoids, diverticulitis or an abscess. Colon cancer is typically so slow-growing that this is unlikely to save more lives than currently prescribed check-ups and self-observation. The increasing flood of data remains constant as it has since language was developed; it'll be interesting to see how we (or our software agents) adjust sensitivity this time to avoid mass panic, or more pseudo-science trends. See: increased frequency of mammograms leading to more false positives, more stress, more unnecessary invasive procedures.

Yeah when I say above checks against millions of records ... Those records would be over many years and possibly many many years of data that can point to data points showing this X group of people died of this disease and their specimen(urine too) all had this same trait.

Why not just encrypt it?

Exactly just encrypt your SH&T ...

Sorry couldn't resist!

The sad thing is we could probably make a vary useful refrigerator that actively keeps track of it's contents and auto set's up a shopping list for you. Using the same basic approach as the self checkout lines (weight + bar-codes). Instead we end up creating 'fake' aka useless versions by sticking an iPad on a refrigerator and marking both up.

Or even the simpler version that just has some camera's and wifi so you can see what's in your fridge while shopping.

Even the thermostat products are disappointing. Nest is cool-looking, but it doesn't really do much. The IoT talk was in a big industrial-type space near the shipyard in SF. The room had openable windows, ceiling fans, and openable skylights with big endless-chain mechanisms, plus modern HVAC. None of this was interconnected.

An intelligent HVAC system measures inside and outside temperature, humidity, CO, CO2, and people presence, and controls windows, fans, vents, heating, and cooling. Such systems can be bought from Honeywell, Johnson Controls, and others. Some big buildings have them. They're great for places like hotels, where big rooms go from empty to full and back throughout the day, with no particular pattern. Smart HVAC systems note CO2 level going up, which indicates more people present, and crank up airflow, regardless of temperature. The main problem with such systems is not that they're expensive, but that they're hard to set up and configure, especially since they're typically run by someone at the janitor level. Setup involves running around with airflow meters while someone at the control panel makes changes to the settings.

Now this is an application for machine learning. Something like a Nest, with control of heat, air conditioning, attic, bathroom, and kitchen fans, and some vents to the outside world, could bring modern HVAC technology to the home. It would learn over time such things as how fast the house temperature ramps up when the heat turns on, how much heat the house loses to the outside when the outside is cold, and how far different parts of the house are from the various vents and fans. When you have a party and the house is full, all the necessary adjustments would happen automatically.

Now that's home automation.

Sure, it's home automation, but why?

Hotels and businesses have those systems because they have a very high throughput of people and constantly changing conditions in a large number of rooms. To have unnecessary heating or cooling for even a short period of time adds up to a lot of money.

But it's not realistic to assume that home has that kind of changing conditions. External conditions may vary quite a bit, but you can easily smooth those out with insulation. A home wouldn't need nearly the same amount of fine and extensive control of a hotel or business, except in rare circumstances that can just as easily be handled manually.

You want to stabilize the temperature in a home? Add more insulation. Done. And it doesn't require an expensive home automation system.

I would love to have intelligent outlets (tied to an intelligent circuit breaker box) so I could monitor electrical consumption at home. I'm sure knowing how much our appliances pull when "off" so we could intelligently unplug them when leaving for vacation, or at least know what's causing the high electric bill for the month.

But I would want to have something completely under my control, where the information doesn't leave the house.

Your home must not have any windows -- or at least, any windows that receive direct sunlight.

During the summer, we manually maintain the indoor temperature by following a simple -- but very manual -- formulaic process:

- When it gets cooler outside than it is inside (evening, night), open the windows. - If it gets too cold outside, close the windows in rooms we're occupying. - When it gets warmer outside than it is inside (mid-day on), close the windows. - When the sun hits the windows directly, close the blinds. - When the sun stops hitting the windows, open them again.

Rinse, repeat.

If we follow these steps, we can keep the house a very comfortable temperature with zero energy costs.

If we don't, it invariably gets too hot AND/OR too cold over a 24 hour period.

"Add more insulation" doesn't help much, unless you're suggesting we use insulation as a window covering.

As I understand it, the nest does have a humidity sensor and activity sensors (I guess since they are part of the one device there are limits on how capable they are). It also figures out how fast the building changes temperature and accesses the outside temp from the internet (this is weak, the temperature at an airport 50 miles away can be dramatically different).

I still wouldn't buy one as I don't quite see the value proposition (and am not deeply offended by mashing buttons to program a schedule), but it seems like a bigger step in the direction you are talking about than you think (and I guess it helps to have smart thermostats in the wild when you start trying to sell smart dampers into homes).

The nest seems like a poor compromise. It's easy to wire up but pricey and the benefits seem questionable given the price. As the Animats points out one option would be to add a lot of home automation given the amount of processing power the thing has and save a significant amount of energy.

However, a vary dumb thermostat with a humidity sensor could save you a fair amount of energy in humid areas over a simple temperature sensor. After all a humid 80 and a dry 80 are different, not just in feel but also in how fast mold grows. Basically, set a max temperature for the humidity level, and decide if you can just vent outside air, or if you need to dehumidify incoming air, or even if you need to heat/cool the air. The other option of simply running a dehumidifier uses a lot of energy and tends to create an overly dry environment.

The big win is having sensors for outside conditions, with fans and vents the system can operate. Then the system knows when to use outside air.

a refrigerator doesn't need the internet to tell you what you need. I'm not a big fan of 'the internet of things'. I see no use for an overpriced thermostat that I could achieve the same result by just turning down the thermostat when i leave. If I am forgetful, perhaps I could apply some sticky note technology.

not to be mentioned politicians have been saying 'we need to upgrade our electric system to a smart grid...' i was like oh cool, whats a smart grid? i was thinking like super efficient wires that had little resistance and cool switching systems. no, its just meters on your residence that can measure electricity so precise they can tell when someone stays over, or when you turn on the lights.

The electric company is trying to force me to switch, keep calling for an appointment. no thanks.

The main advantage to smart meters is it becomes possible to implement time-of-day pricing. That way you can run your dishwasher/laundry before bed and have it actually be cheaper than if you just turned it on during peak hours.

One of the other things that more finely-grained monitoring can do is to help let you know if/when your appliances might need service before they completely break. Like if the load in your refrigerator suddenly spikes because the compressor's going out, you can call a tech out to take a look at it before you come home to a house full of spoiled milk. Or for your air conditioner, you may want to schedule to get the ducts cleaned because there's a clog somewhere. There are quite a few little things that this sort of monitoring can help you with and save you money.

That's quite common for commercial HVAC gear. There are lots of commercial HVAC units regularly sending pager-type messages to a maintenance service. Again, that's been around for years.

Wouldn't it be more sensible to put that into the appliance itself? Detecting at the endpoint seems more reliable (since it's not mixed with other devices, and can be calibrated to the specific model) and private, and while it requires some redundancy in sensors, it avoids the need for a complex monitoring network.

Yeah, I've come to the same conclusions. And I get mad at myself because surely this means I'm not thinking creative enough. But then the ideas I've seen on the web so far are pretty much trivial -- connected kitchen appliances and changing the colour of your living room lighting from your phone, and "wearable tech" that tells you how many steps you've taken that day.

The IoT has huge potential, but when a company with the resources of Samsung is making Instagram connected fridges, maybe it needs to be rethought. Similar to how the web was rethought circa 2000-2001.

Wow, sheltered much?

The IoT is all around you and you haven't even noticed it. It's cash registers and gas pumps, traffic lights, traffic sensors and red light cameras. It's video display ads and airport arrival/departure signs and traffic warning signs and scoreboards. It's burglar alarms and security cameras and inventory control. It's remote weather sensors and irrigation systems. It's commercial HVAC systems. It's remote controlled tractors and construction equipment. It's oscilloscopes and spectrum analyzers and other industrial test equipment. It's sensors in manufacturing plants and oil fields and environmental sensors in conservation areas. It's tracking packages and monitoring conditions in shipping containers. It's video cameras and DVRs. And hundreds more applications I can't think of right now.

Those are definitely some interesting insights and I would imagine that those three categories apply to any luxury item customer. I think the author of this article is more interested in the future of the "internet of things," particularly once they have become commoditized.

My favorite example is the burglar alarm where you just stick 'bugs' on each window in the house and it sends a packet if it gets set off. No "wiring" to cut.

If bike thieves run around with steel cutters in brought daylight, so they can crack bike locks, then they'll surely find a reasonably small and inexpensive radio jammer to carry around, too. No need to cut wirings.

Your alarm has a heartbeat feature to protect against that kind of attack? No problem, the thieves will just walk through your neighborhood with the jammer for a few weeks so you get habituated to false alarms.

This is a common fallacy. Bike thieves do run around with steel cutters in broad daylight, but the probability of having your bike stolen is much less if you lock it, than it is if you don't.

The fallacy arises that conflates a small number of persistent threat actors, with the much larger population of opportunistic actors.

A better way to understand this the expected loss with and without an alarm, versus the cost of acquiring and operating that alarm. My claim is that the cost of such a system would be greatly reduced by its ease of installation and maintenance. That its presence would be at least as effective as a standard 'tape & magnets' type alarm system, and so would be a better overall value than that those older wired systems.

They will have to learn first, which means there is at least a decade before they are out and able to do more damage.

Also you can have systems that spray them with DNA-spray and upload pictures of them to the internet, so that, hopefully, we will end up getting 99+% of them.

How are they powered?

Simple way would be a couple of coin cells. ST Micro just released a CPU that draws only a few nanoamps when asleep and you can wake up, check the state of the world, and go back to sleep once per second for about 3 years according to the handouts at their low power seminar[1].

[1] http://www.st.com/web/en/seminar/stm32l0?sp_rid=NjkwODIzMzI3...

That's seriously impressive, although for the application I'm not entirely convinced I want to go around the house switching coin cells every few years in order not to set off the alarm (or worse).

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