The following few posts comprise the write-up for my topic research this semester. Overall, I found the environmental science uses of IoT technology to be in a very early stage, with more expected to occur in the near future than has already happened. More detail on each section I investigated will be in each section. Links will be provided to each section below.
When investigating the areas of study in environmental Internet of Things, that is IoT technologies as they react and act upon the natural world, I was surprised to find this is a young concept within a field that is itself new. Computer applications that monitor events in the environment have been around for decades, but many of them rely on older technologies to function. The overwhelming majority of applications that touch the natural world use proprietary communication protocols to talk to closed systems, and very rarely do anything over the commodity Internet. The majority of IoT research seems to be devoted to home automation, shipping and delivery; things that make money. That said, there is interest here, mostly from small start-up businesses and community grassroots organizations. The primary areas of research are Pollution Monitoring (air and water quality) and Early Alert Systems (forest fires, earthquakes).
So who is doing this work? Currently, it seems to be mostly research organizations and startups. The latter seem to be focused largely on products they can bring to market, pollution sensor wearables and the like. The former are working on larger projects to see how Internet connected systems can help us understand and react to our natural world. Traditionally, this sort of work has been performed by governments and large organizations, largely for reasons of legal compliance. It is expensive to set up these systems, smaller organizations do not have access to the scale or quality of equipment to match the older systems, which is why you see more networks set up using older protocols and not leveraging the Internet as much. However, local community interest and maker culture are filling in some of these perceived gaps using IoT concepts [1].
I have broken up the coverage of this topic into a few posts, covering the sub-sections of the sort of work taking place, as well as perceived challenges and my conclusions about the field.
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