Essay On Iot Automation In Homes And Cities

According to Gartner, by 2050 the number of the world's population expected to live in smart cities are 73 per cent (Yusuf et al., 2019). This intense growth and urbanization will put a massive strain on the previous-gen infrastructure of the cities and this is why there is a huge urgency to restructure the cities and build them as smart cities. Urban areas that get technologically advanced by integrating ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies), various IoT (Internet of Technology) devices, and electronic methods, are known as smart cities. A smart city gathers specific data information using smart sensors to efficiently manage its assets as well as resources and to improve different operations across the entire city.

 

The data in a smart city is generated from its interconnected devices such as smart homes, transport vehicles, power-supply sources, water-supply sources, and IoT devices used by citizens, which also helps in monitoring and managing power supply, water supply, traffic, hospitals, schools, and most importantly crimes in the city. The Los Angeles city officials introduced the first urban big-data project in the year 1970, which was named A Cluster Analysis of Los Angeles (Verdict, 2022). However, in 1994 the development of the virtual digital city Amsterdam was the actual first smart city. At present, the Smart City Expo World Congress is an annual event held to shape the future of smart cities worldwide, which was first held in Barcelona in the year 2011 (Eremia, Toma and Sanduleac, 2017).

 

 

In a smart city, the most valuable ingredient is its interconnected smart homes. Much like smart cities, smart homes are those, which are equipped with IoT devices that control the lighting, heating, and all the other electronic devices over the internet. Smart homes enable the house owner to remotely monitor and control all the systems and appliances of the house. The aim of a smart home is to improve the convenience as well as the quality of life, along with increasing security. In addition, smart homes help in reducing the power usage of the entire house by efficiently managing all the interconnected systems.

 

In the year 2020, the global market of smart home technologies reached more than 86 billion U.S dollars and is predicted to reach a value of more than 380 billion U.S dollars by the year 2028 (Fortune Business Insights, 2022). The driving forces behind the fast development and growth of smart home devices and businesses are the increased remote home monitoring and security needs, demands for low carbon emission, demands for power efficiency, and most important demands for time-efficiency in life. The Covid-19 pandemic situation has also aided the rapid growth of home automation technologies, as during the pandemic people were forced to spend most of their time inside their homes (Taiwo and Ezugwu, 2020). In addition, during the Covid-19 pandemic, more and more people started studying/working from their homes and the IoT home devices offered a more comfortable study/work environment, which increased the business market of these products. 

 

IoT is an umbrella term, that refers to the devices that are connected to the internet and able to collect as well as exchange data with other connected devices. Based on its development and application, IoT devices can be of five types such as consumer IoT, commercial IoT, military IoT, industrial IoT, and infrastructure IoT. The whole smart home and smart city IoT devices come under the consumer and commercial-based IoT devices. Consumer IoT devices are purposefully developed for everyday usages such as home appliances and voice assistants. Commercial IoT is used in public sectors such as healthcare and transport. Examples of commercial IoT devices are smart pacemakers, connected transport vehicles, and monitoring systems. The development of IoT devices brought the physical worlds and the digital worlds together and made it possible to cooperate with each other. Though it might seem like smart cities and smart homes are the things of the future, a simple glance at the lifestyle of the surroundings proves that IoT-integrated smart homes are the reality. In addition, by 2023 it is estimated that the number of IoT-integrated smart homes will surpass the three hundred million mark (Forbes, 2022).

 

For any IoT device to connect with any other device(s) wirelessly there is a need for two most significant components, which are the internet and the GPS system. The development of the internet was started in 1962 as Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency DARPA and later in 1969 it evolved into Advanced Research Project Agency Network or ARPANET (Fouse, Cross and Lapin, 2020). In the case of GPS (Global Positioning System), it came to reality when the Department of Defense started providing a stable connection of 24 satellites in the year 1993 (Dataversity, 2022). In general, the IoT or Internet of Things as a concept was not officially recognized until the year 1999, which was an instance of a Coca-Cola machine at Carnegie Mellon University (England, 2020). Instead of making a journey to the local store to get a drink, the programmers of the university linked a refrigerator through the internet and checked from time to time to see whether a cold one is available or not.

 

In early 2000, the internet was in its initial phase and its usability of the internet was mostly unknown. In this period RFID or Radio Frequency Identification was the most popular, thus the person who came up with the name Internet of Things, Kevin Ashton believed RFID is the solution for inventory management IoT systems (Balouch, Wafa and Ahmad, 2022).

 

In its initial phase, the smart home IoT devices were too expensive and reserved mostly for wealthy people, which have changed with time and the constant development of smart home devices. From an outsider's perspective, it may seem that home automation using IoT is a recent thing. However, the development of the first IoT smart home product can be traced back to X10 in the year 1975, which was a home automation platform capable of sending digitized information using radio frequency format to the electrical system of the house. The users of X10, using a command console were able to remotely control devices such as light switches, main power outlets, lamps, and radios. The first internet-connected and controlled IoT home automation device was a toaster, which was developed by John Romkey and Simon Hackett in the year 1990 (Ivanyna, 2019). Only after the 2000s, did the development of IoT home automation devices start evolving at a rapid pace. In the year 2014, Amazon launched the Amazon Echo, a voice-controlled music device and the inclusion of Amazon's voice assistant Alexa made the Echo a smart home hub (Neville, 2020).

 

The need for the development of smart city IoT devices began with the constant population growth strain on the previous generation infrastructure of the cities. All these cities already had existing technologies such as wireless communication systems, internet, infrared, Bluetooth and much more. The IoT-embedded smart cities make the best use of these resources to provide a quality experience to the citizens along with decreasing the day-to-day expenses. In a smart city, IoT devices brought most of the changes in areas like lighting of the city, city-traffic management, the safety of the citizens, garbage management, smart parking, water supply, energy-efficient houses and apartments, and efficient public transportation.

 

The Internet of things is a term can be used to describe anything that is connected to the internet. IoT is becoming the next big step for the wireless network evolution and inter-connected devices, especially with decreasing size of sensors. Due to the increased efficiency, remote accessibility, and interconnectivity many sectors are using sophisticated solutions of IoT to digitize their day-to-day activities. In the current market, the prominent users of IoT devices are retail, healthcare, agriculture, smart home and city, and manufacturers.

 

 

As in the context of smart homes, IoT devices help in remote access, control, and monitoring using embedded sensors and systems in the residence. In many ways, smart home technology unlocks individual and societal benefits. The application of IoT devices in a smart home includes smart bulbs, speakers, air conditioners, fans, refrigerators, fitness trackers, smartphones, and dishwashers along with sensors like water quality senor, temperature monitoring sensors, smart door lock sensors, etc. These IoT devices help the end-users to save money, improve convenience, as well as let them contribute to a more environmentally friendly and sustainable life while reinforcing their sense of protection and security. Most home automation systems use a central hub from which every other smart IoT device and sensors are connected. These central hubs mainly use Z-Wave, RedTacton, Li-Fi, or similar types of communication protocols to achieve maximum speed with low latency and power consumption than Wi-Fi or Ethernet (Perwej et al., 2019). However, to provide remote access from anywhere in the world using cloud services, the central hubs are connected via Wi-Fi or Ethernet (Stolojescu-Crisan, Crisan and Butunoi, 2021). 

 

 

Other than that smart home and city context there are several other applications and use cases available for IoT devices. IoT technologies used in urban environments allow for the establishment of smart cities, which helps in improving the budget of the city, along with increasing the quality of life, while growing the investment attraction of that city. In urban environments, the followings are some of the most common applications for IoT solutions: public utility, transit, and residential services. RENFE is an autonomous smart train operator in Spain that monitors and detects any abnormalities occurring in the train and sends them automatically for review to avoid future any mishap (Dasgupta, Gill and Hussain, 2019). In the agricultural sector, various sensors and machine-vision technology are used to monitor and control pest populations mainly in corps, vineyards, and orchards. IoT devices have the biggest positive impact on healthcare sectors. From life-saving devices like the modern smart watches and bands that checks blood pressure, heart rate, and blood oxygen level to live-giving devices like pacemaker, IoT is everywhere in healthcare (Awasthy and Nikhila, 2021). There are even smart ingestible sensor embedded pills available that constantly monitor medication effects from inside of the user.

 

In the utility areas, oil and gas companies are using IoT sensors to optimize production by measuring live oil extraction rates, well temperature and pressure. All these sensors also ensure the safety of the miners by alerting them in advance. Autonomous sailboats equipped with sophisticated smart sensors constantly patrolling and collecting data on various Arctic environmental changes. The progressive insurance companies in the financial sector are using snapshots to calculate premiums for vehicle drivers.

 

A huge and diverse number of stakeholders are involved in any IoT system. Finding and balancing the demands of various stakeholders is an important task in developing commercially effective IoT solutions and devices, especially when each stakeholder is interested in a different set of results. This difference in interest causes various impacts on its key different stakeholders. The key stakeholders of a smart home/city system are the end-users or citizens, device manufacturers, service providers, network providers, and the government.

 

 

The use of IoT devices in a smart home or city has the biggest impact on the end-users or the citizens. For any end-user, the usability of a product depends upon the type of value offered by the product or the value proposition of the product. IoT devices add major efficiency to the customers' life. By connecting to the internet IoT devices are able to operate lights, fans, geysers, robots, doorbells and other household items. Using the internet on smartphones, laptops, or tablets, one can set their lights to the desired color or have their robot, clean the house at a specific time. The concept of smart houses is quickly becoming reality. All the household items and even the security systems are all being designed to be controlled by smartphones, which is currently not just for the wealthy. Many end-users have stated that they have never considered IoT gadgets to be luxury. Instead, they were providing necessary treatments for disorders like allergies caused by micro dust particles.

 

 

IoT devices like smartphones, watches, lighting, smart assistants, and smart security cameras, help the users to connect with others and get access to their homes from anywhere. In addition, medical IoT devices like smart space-maker save the life of the user. On the other hand, from a smart city perspective, smart IoT devices help the government and city management in efficiently managing the wastes of the city, along with providing efficient water supply, efficient power supply with low-energy consumption, and managing traffic.

 

 

Moreover, the data from IoT devices, especially sensitive data, gets collected and stored for further commercial purposes. The collection of customers' PII (personal identifiable information) impacts both the end-users and the companies that makes sensors and networking components, along with third-party vendors who develop software applications by taking commercial advantage using the user data.

 

The usage of IoT devices in a smart home or a smart city creates various challenges for its different stakeholders such as the end-users or the citizens, device manufacturers, service providers, and network regulators (Weber and Podnar, 2019). Despite all the wonderful things the smart IoT devices can perform, their biggest weakness is their over-dependability. The biggest concern of using IoT devices are the malicious attacks, device security and privacy. Privacy refers to individuals who have a self-contained personal space that is free of disturbance from other peoples and organizations. Most IoT devices are too weak to run any kind of anti-virus or malware solutions and the interconnectivity between the devices makes the whole network system of the smart home or city vulnerable. 

 

 

However, the biggest challenge for an end-user of IoT usage is data and privacy-related issues. Getting disclosed sensitive data, such as personal identifiable information or PII to unintended recipients, is an integral aspect of IoT of privacy issues (Haji et al., 2021). PII includes facts like the user’s title, first and last name, date of birth, address, and phone number which are some of the most sensitive personal data or SPI (Dukharm, 2020). In addition, the financial and health information along with the end user's topographical location is also considered SPI.

 

 

From the manufacturers' perspective, the biggest challenge is to provide regular security patch updates to their IoT devices. The IoT devices in sensitive areas of a smart city such as power-grids and law enforcement offices are mostly prone to cyber-attacks and any delay in security patch updates can cause devastating results. In the case of smartphones and computers, an auto-software update is a possibility but IoT devices failed to adopt this functionality, which makes them more vulnerable. The network layer or provider is responsible for the data exchange between two or more IoT devices and during the process, the main security concerns are data integrity and authentication. Using DoS (Denial of Service) attacks, gateway attacks, man-in-middle attacks, or data transit attacks a malicious attacker can interfere with the IoT-generated data (Khader and Eleyan, 2021).

 

 

In the grand scale of a smart city, there are several other challenges faced by the stakeholders such as legislation and policy issues, funding issues, and changes to existing infrastructure-related issues.  

 

The existing frameworks of IoT, are largely important to object manufacturers however it does not include the end-users. IoT manufacturers, consumers, and governments will be able to reduce the issues by utilizing four-phased data-driven 4I architecture as Identify, Insulate, Inspect, and Improve. The 4I framework's Identify phase includes seven critical dimensions: risk, compliance, policy, process, people, data asset, and technology. The significant risks, requirements, and context of IoT are referred to as the Identify stage. The precautionary actions made to prevent lapses using technology and non-technical risk remediation products are referred to as the Insulate stage. The Inspect stage includes the necessary toolkits such as maturity models, audit mechanisms, and software agents to continuously monitor, report, and analyses the IoT Data Governance in terms of risk and value. The Improve stage is the final stage, which is all about keeping things moving forward. 

 

 

The Identify stage of the 4I framework verifies possible risks associated with sharing end user data among the data processors in the data supply chain. As an example, the Identify stages will help in examining legislation such as General Data Protection Regulation GDPR to determine a smart home user’s data protection right and will assess the likelihood of a privacy and security breach. The Insulation phase will bring policies relating to data protection as well as retention and service level agreements with vendors, along with introducing data management in the existing system. The insulation phase is capable of implementing check-my-privacy rules (CPMRs) on a user’s home router to ensure that privacy policies and laws such as GDPR are not broken.

 

 

The Inspection stage entails conducting audit reviews on a regular basis which will ensure that the process, systems and data flow are in compliance. The Inspect phase will involve automated data quality checks and data access-log monitoring. Continuous improvement will be carried out in the Improve phase to guarantee that the system adapts to changing data privacy standards and landscapes. The final phase Improve, will result in the agents being enhanced to ensure that not only is software patched to the most recent version, but that data is also protected using tokenization techniques.

 

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