The Smarter Planet Blog recently teamed up with IBM, interviewing 3 members of the IBM team to ask them to talk about the Internet Of Things and what a smarter planet meant to them. The results are an interesting insight into the possibilities of a new level of digital integration into our lives for the future in the form of an animated video highlighting these possibilities.

We live in a constantly evolving global data field, made up of many factors including the planet itself, human systems and physical objects. Everything around us creates data, but we never used to be able to see or hear it. Now we can, as everything has become instrumented with the development of technology that can measure this data. Essentially the world we live in has grown a central nervous system that we can harness through technology.

Devices can now communicate with each other, sharing information from things like temperature sensors, traffic sensors and water flow rates being just a few of an almost unending list of examples.

As an example of how this can benefit us, consider this example from Andy Stanford-Clark used in the video:

“I wake up in the morning and my alarm clock went off at the right time because it had looked in my diary to know when my first meeting was and had backtracked which ferry I needed to get and therefore what time I needed to get up.

The bathroom heater would have been on for half an hour before that time to make the bathroom nice and warm. It’d know that the temperature had been freezing over night and therefore that ice was going to need to be scraped off my car so I’d need to leave the house five minutes earlier.

And then I’d be getting an audio notification when in my car on the way to my ferry telling me the ferry was running five minutes late and therefore not to hurry”.

On a more immediate note this could also mean that your home appliances could talk to each other. For example if your washing machine, cooker and boiler all knew that they were needed at the same time but also were aware this was bad for the grid, they could prioritise and negotiate a solution.

This sort of digital integration within your life certainly seems like it could make life easier, and those seemingly unavoidable annoyances through the day could become easily avoidable.

Read more about the Internet of Things at the Smarter Planet Blog