Mobile World Live, the media arm of the GSMA, has a new article titled IoT data impossible to use without AI.
The article title is over-dramatic because IoT data can be used without AI. However, as the article goes on to say, AI is …
‘vital to unlocking the “true potential” of IoT’
… that has more truth.
As usual, these things are said with no example or context. Let’s look at a simple example.
Let’s say we want to use x y z accelerometer data from one of our sensor beacons to measure a person’s movement. If we wanted to know if the person is falling we could test for limits on the x y z. This doesn’t use AI. Now consider if we want to know if person is walking, standing, running, lying down (their ‘posture’). You can look at the data forever looking for right patterns of data. Even if you found a pattern, it probably wouldn’t work with a different person. AI machine learning provides a solution. A simplistic explanation is that it can take recordings of x y z of these postures from multiple people and create a model. This model can then be used with new data to classify the posture.
AI solves problems that previously seemed too complex and impossible to solve by humans. Solving such problems often improves efficiency, saves costs, increases competitiveness and can even create new intellectual property for your organisation.
However, don’t automatically turn to AI to make sense of sensor data. Don’t over-complicate things if the data can be analysed using conventional programming.