I received compensation for this post, but all opinions are 100% my own and may differ from yours. I will only endorse companies, products and services that I believe, based on my own experiences, are worthy of endorsement.
First, there was the internet. It was an excellent way to shop and check on movie show times. And shop I did, everything was good. Next, there was the cloud. This gave me a place to put my stuff. And put my stuff I did, everything was good. Now, there is the Internet of Things (IoT).
This gives me a reach beyond the virtual world, and now I can reach out and touch the real world no matter where I am. And reach out and touch I do. In fact, I think that I live in the IoT cloud, and I don’t want to ever leave it.
The IoT Cloud Extends My Reach Into The Physical World
I mean, imagine the cold world it would be without the IoT cloud and if I couldn’t say, “Alexa, turn on the Christmas lights.” I need that reassuring response in my life to know that the lights are on, greeting the world with its bright and shiny welcome.
Conversely, I also welcome Alexa and the IoT to turn them off, leaving me confident that I can either safely go to sleep or embrace the day without wasting the energy on lights that nobody will see.
I Need Something Beyond The Fixed Schedule
Somebody asked me why I didn’t just use a timer for the lights instead of incorporating an IoT solution to manage my celebrations. Well, the answer is simple – I don’t live according to a fixed schedule, and I doubt that many of you do either.
Every time I think that I can fit into a regular routine, an exception happens. Sometimes it is because my son has a school function that demands attention. At other times my family has an event going on that disrupts my perhaps too precisely scheduled calendar.
If it isn’t either of those, I find that my work demands an exception in my regular life. With all of these interruptions in my life, the last thing I want is to have electrically powered home decorations running with a different schedule of their own. No, I need to be able to reach out and control them on my timetable.
This need is precisely what the IoT cloud gives me – the ability to reach out and interact with the world around me. Of course, it isn’t all just Christmas Lights in my IoT world. The list grows every week, but let me give you another example of how I depend on the IoT Cloud. That is, my everyday fitness depends on it.
My Fitness and Health Depend on the IoT Cloud
I have two tools that I use daily in my quest for better fitness, an Apple Watch, which we have talked about before and an app called My Fitness Pal (MFP). I use the Apple Watch every time I do a workout, and often it is the only fitness tool I use.
Most of the time I use it to track an indoor or outdoor walk exercise, which I find it does very well. I hit the button to start, I walk until I think I am going to collapse (okay, I slightly exaggerated there), and I hit the button to stop. That’s it, I’m done.
Luckily the IoT cloud is just getting started. When I hit that “done” button, the watch tells the Health app on my iPhone that I just spent a tremendous (again, with the exaggerations) amount of calories. The Health app, in turn, tells the MFP app on my phone about my heroic efforts.
MFP will then upload that data to its server, just so that later when I am on my computer or iPad I can check and verify that I can indeed eat that cereal bar without blowing the day’s dietary limits. This process repeats every day throughout the week, and I have grown accustomed to the simplicity of it all.
Without the IoT cloud managing it all for me, I would have to do a lot of manual steps to tie everything together, probably to the point that I would not be quite so fortunate in my fitness pursuits.
A Lot of Data Gets Generated with the IoT Cloud
As you might imagine, a lot of data is generated from these daily interactions with the IoT cloud. With just a quick look at the Christmas Lights power schedule, we could probably do a little analysis as to how much we are spending on brightening the moods of our community and how to make it more efficient for the times we want to share the good cheer.
If we analyze our exercise and eating habits, I am sure that we could find times when we eat more or exercise less than we should, leading into bad habits we repeat throughout the year. Can the IoT Cloud help us there, extending once again our benefits of using it?
The IoT Cloud Can Manage Its Own Data
The answer is yes, yes it can. Data expert companies are recognizing the growing need for this self-service reporting, both in personal life and the business world. Many offer robust solutions, including charts, dashboards, and comparative analysis tools to help us get the most from our IoT cloud-driven data.
Of course, the value of having access to an analysis of this collected IoT cloud data is something that probably can’t be appreciated until you try it for yourself. Many of the data-driven companies now offer a tour of their ad-hoc reporting capabilities letting you do just that.
As you probably know by now, many of us are already living on the IoT cloud. It allows us to bend the internet into our life schedule, something that has been needed since the first web page of dancing hamster came online.
This is something that will continue to be a big part of our life, and already I depend on it every day. When we use the data that comes from our interactions with IoT, we just might find that both our work and play lives are made better. How’s that for a gift that just keeps on giving?