Here’s How Qualcomm Is Enabling Life-Transformation Through IoT In India

This article is a sponsored feature by Qualcomm

It’s 3 a.m. on a muggy June night in 2020 when you fell asleep, but a sudden cloudburst has resulted in a significant drop in temperature. But you don’t need to wake up to adjust air-conditioner settings—your AC is connected to the Internet and knowing temperatures have dropped, has self-adjusted settings proactively, ensuring your sleep isn’t disturbed.

You wake up pleasantly surprised to be suddenly in cooler climes. At the gym, your wearable device monitors every aspect of your morning workout, from selecting the right music to your virtual trainer guiding you closely. And as you open your refrigerator to grab some fruit for breakfast, your virtual butler comes up on the smart speaker screen and tells you that taking a cab to work may take much longer because of a tree collapse and suggests you take the metro. The metro rail operator knows about road disruptions and has increased service frequency to meet higher demand. Once at work, you receive a message from your home monitoring camera confirming the new wireless earbuds you ordered last night have been delivered to your front door.

This is how life will be in the era of the Internet of Things (IoT). In fact, this era is no longer in the realm of just future possibility but real even today.

IoT Applications And Uses

In homes, IoT will include connected appliances ranging from connected refrigerators to washing machines to entertainment systems with augmented and virtual reality capabilities, as well as heating and air-conditioning systems, security systems such as cameras, motion detectors; safety devices such as smoke and gas detectors, ranging all the way down to even smart bulbs and lighting. On the personal front, IoT devices will include wearables that not only help in fitness, but also in personal security and healthcare. And wearables will range from smart watches to smart headsets, smart clothing, smart eyewear and more.

In industry, offices and public infrastructure, IoT will be used to enable smart factories and warehouses, autonomous cars, intelligent stores, smart energy grids as well as environmental protection through pollution monitoring, public safety, energy efficiency, education and healthcare. The buildings we live and work in will be smart buildings in smart cities where everything from safe water supply to street lighting will be supported through IoT.

Answers to IoT Challenges

While the possibilities through the power of IoT are transformational, it’s clear that connected things will bring their own challenges and it will be a huge challenge to enable life transformation, while also ensuring IoT security and reliability. One of the biggest challenges starts with connectivity itself. If everything from your refrigerator to your light bulb is connected to the Internet, leave alone smart factories, trains and power grids, imagine the data connectivity needed to reliably connect these billions and billions of devices. Whether they use Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, cellular or other connectivity technologies, all these devices need to work in concert. For instance, earlier this year Qualcomm introduced a new chip that allows smart home devices from different ecosystems to talk to each other – so even if some your light bulbs use Bluetooth and others communicate over Wi-Fi, they all turn on together when you ask your smart speaker to do so.

Indeed, Qualcomm has been developing solutions for IoT even before the term IoT was coined. The company’s 30-year history in pioneering mobile communication technologies has helped set the stage for IoT. Besides, there are already more than 1.5 billion IoT devices delivered using Qualcomm technologies, and the company already ships more than 1 million chips per day for IoT use. In IoT segments like wearables, over 80 percent of Android Wear smartwatches launched or announced are based on Qualcomm products. Moreover, Qualcomm was the pioneer of 3G and 4G, and is now leading the development of the global 5G standard to ensure that billions of new smart IoT devices can be reliably and securely connected.

Pillars For IoT Transformation

But that’s just a start, given the immense potential of IoT. Qualcomm is supporting IoT manufacturers and the overall ecosystem in various ways:

1. Products and platforms: Beyond chips, Qualcomm uses its technical expertise to design platforms that help customers commercialize IoT products quickly and cost-effectively. The company makes available more than 25 production-ready reference design platforms through a network of original design manufacturers (ODMs) for products including voice-enabled home assistants, connected cameras, drones, virtual reality headsets, lighting, appliances and smart hubs/gateways.

2. Interoperability and standards: IoT interoperability and standards are critical to avoid fragmentation. Collaboration, using open standards, drives ecosystem growth, underpins security and promotes interoperability across the ecosystem. Qualcomm’s approach is to support all key wireless technologies, communication protocols and cloud services on its portfolio of products – Whether innovators prefer to work with cellular, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or ZigBee; Amazon, Google or Microsoft cloud; HomeKit or OCF specifications; there is a Qualcomm solution for them, and the technology to make it all work together.

3. Security: Robust security needs to be built into the silicon that powers IoT devices. A solid IoT security approach requires a combination of hardware-based security features tightly integrated with the software, communication protocols, applications and the cloud. Qualcomm has a long heritage of providing the mobile security solutions found in billions of devices around the world, and these solutions are now available for consumer and industrial IoT applications as well.

4. Artificial Intelligence (AI): In 2007, Qualcomm started exploring spiking neuron approaches to machine learning for computer vision and motion control applications, and later expanded the scope of the research to look not just at biologically inspired approaches but artificial neural networks. The company is focused on the implementation of AI on end devices – smartphones, cars, robotics, and the like – to ensure that processing can be done with or without a network or Wi-Fi connection. The benefits of on-device AI include immediate response, enhanced reliability, increased privacy protection, and efficient use of network bandwidth.

5. Collaborations: The IoT will realise its potential only through a strong partnership ecosystem and hence Qualcomm is working closely with leaders in industries as diverse as consumer products, to smart homes to industrial IoT; mobile operators, cloud providers, device manufacturers, camera leaders to even the fashion industry. Hundreds of brands rely on Qualcomm technology including Google, Amazon, Microsoft, GE, Honeywell, Tyco, Sony, Bang & Olufsen, Panasonic, Bose, Plantronics, Samsung, Emerson, LG, GoPro, Acer to Emporio Armani, Fossil, Hugo Boss, Tommy Hilfiger, Michael Kors, Movado, Louis Vuitton, Montblanc and others.

Empowering IoT Transformation In India

To foster local innovation, Qualcomm started with the “Design in India Challenge” in 2016, and this year it launched the Design in India Program (QDIP) that aims to build a core design technology and innovation hub in India. To enable the transformation of India into a digitally empowered society, QDIP has shortlisted 14 startups in the domains of Smart Infrastructure, Biometric Devices, Payment Terminals, Agricultural Technology, Medical Technology and Rural IoT. Besides financial rewards, the 14 startups have access to the state-of-the-art Qualcomm Innovation Lab in Bengaluru and Hyderabad along with engineering and technical support to help bring their products to life.