Eighty billion things will be connected to the internet by 2020, according to research by France-based IDATE.

According to IDATE’s Internet of Things report, 15 billion things – including machines, connected devices and objects connected via an intermediary – were connected to the internet in 2012, up from four billion two years earlier.

IDATE predicts that 85% of the 80 billion things to be connected by 2020 will fall into what it describes as the ‘internet of objects’ category – including objects that do not contain the electronics required to connect directly to the internet but which may be connected via the use of an intermediate device via, for example, radio-frequency identification or 2D barcodes. The leading vertical markets for internet of objects devices will be pharmaceuticals and textiles, according to IDATE.

Communicating devices will account for 11% of the 2020 total, with machine-to-machine connected devices accounting for 4%, according to IDATE.