Environmental IoT: Challenges and Conclusions

The use of IoT in the environment has a long way to go, but projects are starting to develop and new ideas are being tried out. One interesting article I came across while researching this topic actually looked at IoT and the environment from a slightly different angle; the impact a “smarter environment” may have on the environment itself. Because most IoT solutions are subject to rapid hardware interactions and changing requirements, a lot of electronic waste is generated by developing IoT solutions, even those intended on benefiting the environment. Many of the places small electronics are produced have relatively unknown manufacturing conditions and could be causing harm while the end product is intended to be used for good. The end effect is that as IoT use in the environment increases, the environment itself could suffer for it. A few suggested ways of mitigating this are the use of open source code and sensors. If a proprietary application or sensor is abandoned by it’s creator, it is effectively dead and must be discarded. If the code and sensor are open, maintenance could move to the next interested party and the technology will survive obsolescence better [19].

Another concern that has come out of the increase in IoT projects intended to report on the environment is the trustworthiness of the data. Currently, the public does not have access to the quality of sensors that larger organizations do because of cost constraints and other mitigating factors. There are no strict standards enforcing data, so using data from multiple places could yield incorrect results. On top of that, aggregating data from different sensors monitoring the same thing could yield incorrect information as well [14]. One suggestion to approach this problem is, for now, not to use community generated data from these IoT systems alone. Instead, use it to supplement existing data from larger organizations [1]. One step that would go a long way would be for larger organizations to make more of this data available for public consumption. Also, larger organizations taking very public actions to develop systems for public use would encourage the development of ever more useful services.

Internet of Things applications, by their very nature, have some technical hurdles as well. They have high bandwidth requirements that grow quickly as more sensors are included in a network. They have high storage costs that must be paid for by someone. And with all that data comes access problems and privacy implications [20]. These are all issues that need to be worked out in the short term before IoT technologies on the scale of monitoring the environment become more feasible. Yet there are constant advances that make these systems more and more practical. Data storage is getting cheaper and easier to distribute, and technologies like Zygbee (which are designed with power constraints in mind) make leaving a sensor in a remote location for an extended period of time more reasonable. While many of these systems are not yet ready to become part of our everyday life, people are thinking about these problems and coming up with approaches daily. Who knows what it will look like in a few years.