THE WHO:

Because the QNX Neutrino RTOS has been around for over 30 years, BlackBerry’s embedded OS and IoT services have had time to proliferate through many markets, including the medical device industry, but there are other players in this space that are vying for a spot ahead of the curve in IoT.

Unlike the traditional members of corporate healthcare, IoT is presenting a very enticing environment for data companies and service providers to enter the space. Companies like: Siemens, Ericson, General Electric, and IBM, are starting to take a bigger focus on embedded devices and big data in the healthcare industry. Most of these companies have already been building medical devices and other tools for the industry – but the emphasis is now on building a platform for all of those various devices.

The vast field in which many of these companies play is what makes IoT so interesting. From hardware to software, the IoT race will not be solely in the virtual word of bits and bytes; it will be very much a competition to build physical devices as well. It’s a new field that will be pushing companies to venture into new partnerships and forge new relationships to get the hundreds of thousands of embedded medical devices to work seamlessly in concert with each other to provide us with the best information possible for care.

Conclusion:

A thing, in the Internet of Things, can be a person with a heart monitor implant, a farm animal with a biochip transponder, an automobile that has built-in sensors to alert the driver when tire pressure is low — or any other natural or man-made object that can be assigned an IP address and provided with the ability to transfer data over a network.

As Kevin Ashton said in 1999, “If we had computers that knew everything there was to know about things — using data they gathered without any help from us — we would be able to track and count everything and greatly reduce waste, loss and cost. We would know when things needed replacing, repairing or recalling and whether they were fresh or past their best.”

With these advantages come enormous risks, especially when it comes to the accuracy and security of IoT data. David Stephenson, author of SmartStuff: An Introduction to the Internet of Things, says “Paradoxically, the very principle that makes the IoT so powerful — the potential to share data instantly with everyone and everything (every authorized entity, that is) — creates a huge cyber security threat.”. This is something that cannot be overstated and is a space where BlackBerry, along with others, is aiming to provide the backbone, upon which these entire data networks will function not just efficiently, but more importantly, securely and safely.