We Discuss the Present and Future of IOT in Smart Cities.

What are the new developments in “Internet of Things” and how do they change our cities and our very lives? And what are and will smart cities be like, taking IOT into account? How will it affect our relationship with objects, with our environment? David Johera, Commercial Director of Logitek – Wonderware Spain, focused on these three questions in his speech during the presentation ” The Internet of Things in Smart Cities” at the Smart City Expo 2014.

The reality is that the Internet of Things is here to stay and opens up a new world of possibilities for us. The applications of this technological development are found in multiple fields. Our daily life is dotted with devices with the possibility of interconnecting. Wherever human activity reaches, IOT will arrive. Some Examples:

• Gesture-based voice interfaces could improve the usability of computers.
• Devices applicable to medicine and health monitoring services could help prevent and treat diseases.
• Improvements in logistics planning systems that could reduce waste.
• Smart cars that could park when the driver has left the vehicle in certain smart areas of the city.
• Sensors that can detect environmental pollution

Not everything is done, many aspects need to be improved, security is already one of the most immediate concerns today. A lot of work has been done on server security, but “Most of the devices exposed on the Internet are still vulnerable.” For example, would we like someone to be able to detect that we are with three people in our car 500 km from our house? Surely not, issues of this nature will have to be resolved.

At a more general level, the city, we could almost imagine it as a large data-generating machine that facilitates communication between people, between machines… all this information and new communication protocols is an opportunity to look for new developments for the smart city of the future.

Faced with this situation of infinite growth of IOT, technological solutions are required that are capable of integrating and interconnecting multiple devices on the same platform that converge in the same operational direction.

This platform, of course, must be horizontal, scalable and open, as well as modular, so that it grows at the rhythm of the city understood as a living organism. In the same way, it must also be independent of existing technologies and protocols, in order to pour all existing infrastructures and all those that we will have in the future, currently unknown, onto it. Wonderware, through its platform, allows the integration of information from different infrastructures and thus positions itself as the most direct response to a growing need for global connectivity.