There’s a world of data out there.  A big chunk of it is handcrafted, or, at least, mediated by humans. Cashiers scan bar codes. Field researchers tag endangered species. Traders enter buy and sell decisions. But, as we move into the world of The Internet of Things (IoT), more and more of the data that will be collected, processed, evaluated, and used will come from automated systems.

IoT will only fulfill its promises of improving logistics, warning us of environmental dangers, personalizing our experiences, and more if our world is inundated with a wide variety of sensors. We already see the beginnings of this.

Space I drive my car under an arch, and, thanks to an RFID tag, my presence is recognized, and I am charged a highway toll. The GPS in my smartphone directs me toward my destination and tells me where I might get lunch along the way. Would I like Indian or Italian cuisine?

Five senses The Internet already has eyes and ears.

• Video cameras fill our streets, shopping malls, offices, hospitals, and campuses. In casinos, they use face recognition to detect unwanted guests, such as card counters. On the road, they record the license plates of every car that passes. More subtly, light sensors adjust the illumination of my smartphone screen. And, of course, invisible parts of the spectrum (such as UV) also play a role in our lives. And let’s not forget detection of QR codes.
• Microphones provide audio of meetings for streaming, recording, and analysis. They monitor noise pollution and form components of intrusion detection systems.
• Touch is more than one sense for humans. While temperatures are collected and become data points, data capture of the mechanical aspects of touch (such as surface distortion) is limited. And the Internet doesn’t feel pain, as far as I know.
• Taste and smell are best emulated by chemical sensing system. Outside the lab, these are most often used to maintain safety and comfort (detecting, say, humidity and toxins like carbon monoxide). Health monitoring toilets may work their way into the mix. The most interesting frontier where these kinds of sensors are likely to become more common is inside the human body, helping us to regulate sugar levels or to maintain therapeutic level of antibiotics and painkillers.

Time We have synchronized our watches (and our phones, blog postings, intravenous drips, and package deliveries). More and more of the devices that populate our lives track, time, and coordinate. We get longitudinal information, follow changes, and discover relationships because time is included as an intrinsic part of the data we collect.

The range of sensors available is amazing (see types), and new sensors continue to be developed. The depth sensing technology in Microsoft Kinect gaming systems has opened up a variety of possibilities. (Check out the weird hacks in this video.) Much of the excitement will come as data from these sensors is combined, correlated, contextualized, mined, prioritized, and interpreted. People will make decisions and act based on rich new landscapes of information.

However, as with data capture, their decisions and actions may become a vanishingly small contribution to putting data to use. The major players use algorithm based automated traders to maximize profits in electronic markets. The IoT will bring action on data and on things thanks to a proliferation of actuators. I’ll write about what’s happening in that arena in my next post on this topic.