BARCELONA, Spain (AP) — We’re in the beginning of a world
in which everything is connected to the Internet and with one another,
while powerful yet relatively cheap computers analyze all that data for
ways to improve lives.
Toothbrushes tell your mirror to remind you
to floss. Basketball jerseys detect impending heart failure and call
the ambulance for you.
At least that’s the vision presented this
past week at the Mobile World Congress wireless show in Barcelona,
Spain. The four-day conference highlighted what the tech industry has
loosely termed "the Internet of things."
Some of that wisdom is already available or promised by the end of the year.
Fitness
devices from Sony and Samsung connect with your smartphones to provide
digital records of your daily lives. French startup Cityzen Sciences has
embedded fabric with heart-rate and other sensors to track your
physical activities.
Internet-connected toothbrushes are coming
from Procter and Gamble’s Oral-B business and from another French
startup, Kolibree. The mirror part is still a prototype, but Oral-B’s
smartphone app does tell you to floss.
Car makers are building in
smarter navigation and other hands-free services, while IBM and AT&T
are jointly equipping cities with sensors and computers for parking
meters, traffic lights and water systems to all communicate.
Internet-connected
products represent a growth opportunity for wireless carriers, as the
smartphone business slows down in developed markets because most people
already have service.
With the technological foundations here, the
bigger challenge is getting people, businesses and municipalities to
see the potential. Then there are security and privacy concerns — health
insurance companies would love access to your fitness data to set
premiums.
At a more basic level, these systems have to figure out a
way to talk the same language. You might buy your phone from Apple,
your TV from Sony and your refrigerator for Samsung. It would be awful
to get left out because you aren’t loyal to a single company. Plus, the
smartest engineers in computing aren’t necessarily the best in clothing
and construction.
Expect companies to work together to set
standards, much the way academic and military researchers created a
common language decades ago for disparate computer networks to
communicate, forming the Internet. Gadget makers are starting to build
APIs — interfaces for other systems to pull and understand data.
Building
everything is too much for a single company, yet "they want all this
stuff to work together," said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the
Linux Foundation, a backer of the Tizen project for connecting watches,
cars and more. Samsung’s new fitness watches will use Tizen, and tools
have been built to talk with Samsung’s Android phones.
As for
persuading customers, IBM executive Rick Qualman said the emphasis now
is on pilot projects to demonstrate the benefits, such as better
deployment of equipment and personnel during a natural disaster.
At
the wireless show last week, Zelitron, a Greek subsidiary of Vodafone,
showed how retailers can keep track of refrigerators used to dispense
bottled drinks. The system tracks temperatures and inventory, and knows
if a fridge is inadvertently unplugged.
Meanwhile, Cityzen hired
athletes to demonstrate its connected fabric by playing basketball. Data
get sent to a smartphone app using Bluetooth wireless technology.
Gilbert
Reveillon, international managing director for Cityzen, said he’s had
interest from a U.K. car insurance company and Chinese hospitals. Health
data can tell you whether you’re fit to drive and can call paramedics
in an emergency.
Some customers might worry about security, given
recent breaches compromising credit and debit card numbers at Target and
other major retailers.
Determined hackers seem to constantly find
loopholes. Imagine someone spying on you remotely through security
cameras in your home or tricking your home security system into
believing your car is approaching, so it opens your garage door
automatically.
AT&T emphasizes that it uses encryption and
other safeguards for its connected services, which include security
monitoring and energy-efficiency controls in homes. Glenn Lurie,
AT&T’s president of emerging enterprises and partnerships, said the
U.S. wireless carrier goes through extensive security certification and
exceeds industry recommendations.
Reveillon said any data sharing
by Cityzen will be in aggregate form, with users’ identities removed. He
said individual users could decide to share more, but that would be up
to them. He said French regulators are quite strict on that.
But
U.S. regulation isn’t, and a government subpoena is typically enough to
override any promises of privacy. Once the information is available,
privacy advocates say, it’s tempting to find other uses for it.
Jonathan
Zittrain, a law professor at Harvard University, said it’s difficult
for people to say no when presented with immediate benefits because any
potential problems are vague and years away.
"Information seems
harmless and trivial at the moment, but can be recorded forever . and
can be combined with other data," he said. "I don’t think we’ve come to
terms with that yet."
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