Over the summer, I wrote about how Internet of Things will sometimes need to merge with Real Time Communications. Dialogic even created an infographic on this concept. Let me explain more since I’ve had a few questions come in since then.
IoT in its simplest form is basically sensors sending data. That in and of itself is not that interesting. What is interesting is that some kind of analysis gets done on the data, and if something is akilter then an alert is triggered. In many cases, this alert will go to another machine (M2M!) and that machine will do something. For instance, if there is a system to measure soil humidity, and the soil humidity gets below a certain set threshold, then a sprinkler system could be turned on.
In other cases, the alert will go to a human. For instance, if water pressure is measured to be low in a pipe in a city system, then a human will be dispatched to look where the pressure is low and where presumably a leak is. And the pipe can be fixed. Or if a beer keg in a bar measures low beer, a text message can go to the beer provider so another keg can be dispatched to the bar in time before disaster strikes! Phew.
As we get further into when an alert will go to a human, in some of these cases, real-time communications will need to occur. As I wrote in my summer blog, there may be a case of a car crash and then the car can go into a mode to talk to the driver. This conversation can be overheard by a human who could then send help if required. I’m sure you as a reader can think of other examples of this. For instance, let’s say some emergency is happening (the IoT devices figured that out because of various anomolies in their standard readings), then a conference call to the proper authorities can be kicked off by the IoT system, replete with video of the emergency. Or maybe closer to home, if someone is ringing your doorbell, then a live video feed can go to your smartphone so you can see if you want to actually get up and go to the door. There have also been many healthcare examples written about where voice and/or video would be required.
Dialogic has been doing real-time communications since it’s inception almost 35 years ago. We have both the underlying technology to help you create a cloud-based RTC IoT application, or we can even create a customer application for you.
