This report invites the reader to examine the environment that they are sitting in. This may be in public, sitting at a desk, or reading this on a smartphone or tablet. In the near future, IoT will transform all of these surroundings. Many ‘things’ are already ‘connected’, and chances are that someone, somewhere, is developing ways of connecting the ‘things’ that aren’t.
Earlier in 2015, Fjord and Accenture Digital released a 103-page report entitled The Era of Living Services10. They envisioned a utopian Connected Home, Human and Habitat:
“At home, personalized Living Services could adjust the heating, lighting or music volume to fit with the preferences of the person walking into the room, and take into consideration the time, temperature and daily behavioural pattern of that individual or family group... Living Services have the capability to help us get the most out of our leisure and downtime... Living Services will come to know what we enjoy doing, and will understand the context of our lives including our time and financial restrictions, how happy, healthy and fit we are, and with whom we are spending our leisure time. Designed to learn through real time analytics, they will be able to curate choices and deliver personalized recommendations tailored to the weather, our location, mood, health and even our bank balance11”.
IoT can be split into eight areas: homes, health care, cities, vehicles, manufacturing, transportation, energy and agriculture12. This report will focus on the consumer areas – homes (Connected Home), health care and wearables (Connected Human), and cities and cars (Connected Habitat).
McKinsey & Company and Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA) have compiled a table summarising some IoT applications consumers can expect to see in the near future (Figure 3)13.
Figure 3 – Existing IoT case studies. Source: McKinsey
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