Kia Ora
Wow! How things have changed. In last month’s newsletter we were talking about events including TechFest 2020, held in the Waikato with over 1000 attendees, and now the whole country is on lockdown.
I reached out to some of our members and one commented “IoT becomes a concept of profound impact in times like these since it enables the distribution of information gathering without human involvement”. Tracking and tracing is certainly a hot topic at present with people in NZ looking into using mobile phones and the Singapore Government making its app freely available, as well as other apps and solutions being put forward in an effort to combat the spread of COVID-19.
Meanwhile telehealth, virtual healthcare and e-consultations are also proving valuable in enabling health professionals to provide care whilst keeping themselves and their patients safe.
I have to wonder what we could come up with if we got all the IoT experts together. Machine learning to identify those at risk, facial recognition and computer vision to identify those carrying the virus, monitoring to alert authorities to breaches during lockdown, wearables for early diagnosis, effective remote monitoring and predictive maintenance for machinery or even to a robotics sensor technology so we don’t have to touch so many things, and the list goes on. At the same time, I was reminded by another of our members of the importance of ensuring linkages are robust, resilient and well described in order for solutions to scale and how the current state of remote distributed working was a great practice ground. It would be great to hear other members’ thoughts around innovation and ideas.
The IDC have published a timely report available to our members Impact of COVID-19 on A/NZ Telecoms: Operators Act to Curtail Churn and Control Costs. “My comment on this report, from an IoT perspective, is that with increased activity in remote working, remote monitoring and remote management, we could expect both IoT CAPEX and OPEX investment in these areas to increase over the next 12 months. We can also expect to see enhanced resilience in both telco network and digital infrastructure including support for their IoT platforms” Kriv Naicker, IoT Alliance.
As for events, we are planning, like everyone else, how we can go digital, starting with a virtual meet up with the global IoT community for world IoT Day on 9 April, you can register here. We’re not sure it will be as innovative as XR (Cross-Reality = AR + VR + MR) in the fashion industry, but we will try!
Nga mihi nui,
The team at the NZ IoT Alliance
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