The Power of the Internet of Things

In our last post "What is the Internet of Things", we examined the basic definition and concerns with connected "Internet of Things" devices.  While smart fridges or thermastats are cool, and certainly helpful around the house at times, we find ourselves drawn to answering the question "what else can I do with an IoT device?".

Eyrus: A Case Study

We have actually already used IoT to solve a challenging problem, for a company called Eyrus.  Eyrus provides real-time analytics tracking equipment and personnel at large construction sites.  Essentially they can know if equipment leaves the premises, and know when Joey was on the site - all helpful things when you consider employee timesheets, job costing, theft prevention, emergency management and all the features that the Eyrus system provides construction management.

How can a system have all that information?  Simple: IoT devices.  At Lotus, we worked closely with our custom hardware vendor partner to create enclosures that house power, processing, networking and antennas that run our Ruby software application.  As people or equipment move near an antenna, RFID tags are recorded and our Internet of Things devices take that data and relay to the cloud web application we created.

From there, the data is analyzed and reported upon for managers to use in a myriad of ways.

Interested in reading more about our work with Eyrus? Read the full case study.

Mogul: A Case Study

We're not new to this IoT movement - we have another project under our belt.  Mogul Wireless is a temperature and humidity monitoring company providing real time monitoring, alerting, and compliance for health care professionals.  Our IoT devices are deployed in hospitals and doctors offices on the west coast, constantly sampling temperature, humidity, and air pressure data to report to our cloud web application.

When a temperature or humidity value recorded is outside of a predefined range, then users can be alerted via text message, email, or automated phone call to resolve the issue.  All the data (and there is lots of it) is recorded and kept for compliance purposes.

Read the full case study of our work with Mogul here.

Monitoring the Monitors

Here's a question for you - who is monitoring our software to ensure that we have applied important security patches and have a system that is running as robustly as possible?  For web, mobile, and even IoT - Prospector is still a great way to track the dependencies in the project and we make use of Prospector to stay ahead of the competition.