Building the Internet of Things



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b.Predictive maintenance


This white paper focuses on a common scenario IoT enables that we call predictive maintenance: performing maintenance with a focus on timeliness, acting exactly when needed instead of at regular intervals, and predicting and preventing failures before they happen, based on learning from historical data. Predictive maintenance—just-in-time maintenance—will massively transform how organizations and consumers manage equipment as well as people. Predictive maintenance also informs more traditional preventative maintenance patterns, optimizing routine maintenance activities.

Predictive maintenance scenarios


The potential for useful applications in the Internet of Things (IoT) is endless. This section focuses on scenarios that illustrate concrete benefits based on predictive maintenance, where maintenance can be performed on both inanimate and living things. The following scenarios that we describe provide examples of the enormous potential that IoT holds for enterprises.

c.Healthcare


With the previously described change in world demographics, there is an increasing need for “remote patient management,” allowing elderly citizens to only come to the doctor or the hospital when the need arises, based on telemetry captured by smart devices. Some early innovation in this space, more geared toward health self-management and consumer devices can be seen in watches with sensors that collect a variety of data, such as blood pressure and heart rate. When body temperature, oxygen levels, and CO2 levels are combined with the ability to display this data to the patient and physician in real time, this alleviates the stress of full waiting rooms and reduces the cost per patient.19 Another example is an in-home glucose monitor that uploads a patient’s vital signs to a cloud-based health platform, where the data is analyzed and presented back to the patient in an easy-to-understand format on a mobile device, and in a more complex format on a touchscreen to the doctor. The doctor can review the patient’s information and then use the touchscreen to send feedback to the patient and write a prescription.20

Powerful, specialized, cloud-connected devices like these that enable doctors and patients to work together to remotely monitor vital signs, exchange information, communicate, and alert relatives, all in real time, are either becoming available or in development. By actively monitoring patients at home21,22 or while they are mobile, healthcare professionals can provide a higher level of care, reduce in-hospital waiting time and costs, and reduce stress for everyone involved, which leads to better patient outcomes. Using technology to accurately predict and signal medical staff about conditions that need attention, enables healthcare professionals to anticipate patient issues instead of reacting to them, and remedy them before they become critical, all while maintaining the security and privacy of the data collected from such technologies.23 As a positive side effect, the collected evidence of provided care could also help alleviate the issue where doctors in the U.S. are sometimes reluctant to provide prescriptions or diagnosis over the phone because of billing restrictions,24 which forces patients to visit the office of the healthcare provider, and as a result waste a lot of everyone’s time for the treatment of common or recurring ailments.


d.Automotive


Vehicles contain telemetry about their operation, and about the service activities and faults that happen on them. They travel through different locations, different weather conditions, and different usage scenarios—a four-wheel drive vehicle climbing trails, a sports car in the mountains, or a family van loaded with children. Each of these factors can have an effect on how the vehicle operates, as well as its reliability, comfort, safety, and performance. If the vehicle manufacturer or a vendor-agnostic data aggregator/analyst can collect this data, and analyze it over time, trends can be identified to find new, timelier, and more cost effective and impactful actions to take. These can include maintenance on the vehicle, reconfiguring it, which in turn can help to prevent recalls, or conversely trigger recalls to keep the vehicle safe, and more fun, useful, and cost effective for everyone involved, including the owner, the operator, and the passengers.

e.Manufacturing


A service technician is dispatched to analyze an elevator after someone reports that its doors will not close. The building owner is hearing from people who are unhappy that they have to walk up the stairs. It takes the engineer an hour to drive to the building and find the elevator. After arriving, he works through a standard checklist for another hour, only to conclude that the elevator works as expected. As so often happens, a fleeting obstruction, such as a coffee cup between the doors of the elevator or accumulated dust and dirt in the sliding rail might have caused the problem.

The service technician drives back to his office, having spent a total of three hours on a phantom problem. At $150 USD per hour and with more than one million elevators in service, incidents where equipment is evaluated as operating normally upon inspection such as in this scenario can have a big impact on the profitability of an elevator company, depending on the type of maintenance contract.

Moving beyond this reactive maintenance illustration, capturing telemetry about the motors that operate the elevator or the speed that the doors of the elevator close allows the engineer to take a more predictive approach. For example, an increase in the consumption of energy or a decrease in the door closing speed might signal a service request, and trigger a maintenance crew to provide the service before the elevator breaks down and customers call support, thus saving money, reducing downtime, and increasing customer satisfaction.



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