Last year a manufacturer asked me to add Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) to a consumer device similar to a heart monitor. The manufacturer used a BLE profile similar to the Heart Rate Monitor Profile. When I first heard of this, I asked why they didn’t just use a serial communication profile with a custom protocol. Implementing the BLE stack seemed like needless work that would just result in it being easier for other companies’ products to use the data. Part of the reason for using the application-specific profile is its built-in state machine designed to save energy by avoiding needless radio transmissions. The main reason, though, is the OEM actually wants other companies’ equipment interacting with their products. BLE is becoming a standard feature on phones and tablets, and support for a BLE profile means any BLE-enable device will be able to see the product and get meaningful data from it in formats specified by the standard.

A few weeks ago in the January 2014 issue of IEEE Communications, I read a paper on the evolution of the internet of things (IoT). I always thought of IoT as a buzzword with little meaning. Even the article in IEEE Communications contains lines like “in the IoT, all that is real becomes virtual” and “We are currently observing a generational leap from objects with a certain degree of smartness to objects with an actual social consciousness.”

As I read on, however, I realized that the heart monitor OEM’s paradoxical interest in their product being visible to other companies’ equipment is an example the IoT.

The IEEE Communications article defines an evolution of the IoT from smart objects, to acting objects, to social objects. Smart objects are devices with processors running web protocols. Acting objects are devices that interact with human networks. They can send messages or post data and accept commands from human networks. Social objects establish connections between devices owned by humans who may have no connection to each other. The authors offer various examples of possible social objects. The one that stood out the most to me was the idea of having equipment seek fixes for problems from similar equipment. There was a hypothetical example of a tablet that had a problem connecting to some peripheral. That tablet could look for phones of the same model and peripherals, and ask the other tablet for the steps to get the peripheral working.

During the late 90s, I worked at a company that was designing a refrigerator with an Internet connection. It sounded silly at the time, but maybe it was ahead of its time. The problem was there just were not enough other devices on the Internet to make it useful.

It seems conceivable that devices in the near future will commonly connect to one another without regard to connections among their users. I’m not sure if this merits its own word, and I don’t think the final name for it will be “social objects”. This phrase already has an unrelated meaning of objects or interests around which people socialize. I predict some automated interaction among embedded devices will become commonplace and not need a name. The advantages will outweigh any creepiness of it, but there will always be nostalgia for a simpler times when only human beings, and never machines, networked with one another