Sensing opportunity: sensor manufacturers need to grab IoT opportunity

The Internet of Things contains billions of connected devices.

These will only increase in number as we usher in the world of ‘smart’ devices. These devices, things like smartphones, wearables and many others, all use sensors. Sensors can monitor things like our health, our home security and soil moisture, to name but a few. 

We also see them widely used in the industrial Internet of Things (IoT) where they are able to monitor production processes to provide data that can help to reduce costs and increase revenue.

Another successful use case for IoT sensors is in agriculture. Here, technology has married connected sensors in an ‘agricultural IoT’ to help even the remotest of farms in developing countries to monitor soil moisture, pesticide spraying and even the optimum time to harvest.

Are we therefore seeing all sensor manufacturers jumping onto this IoT bandwagon? I do not believe that they are truly making the best of the opportunity that IoT presents. I’ve been taking a closer look at sensor manufacturers to try to understand what is going on in the market. Is anyone grabbing the bull by the horns?

Saving lives

Sensors are a massively important part of any IoT solution. Think of the photoelectric sensor that detects smoke and alerts people to vacate a burning building. In the solution stack in which the sensor resides, the end customer is ultimately paying for the stack and not for the ‘hero’ sensor. If you consider the business case value of the sensor then why not charge for the actual value that the sensor delivers to the business (people’s lives saved) rather than simply paying the price for the ‘widget’? 

Even when we realise that not all sensors are represented to the extent of the burning building example, when you combine them they do add up to provide absolute value. The challenge here is real skills and expertise – it’s unlikely that any given sensor manufacturer will have specialised knowledge of IoT. Therefore, will they have the capability to provide sensors that are easy to connect for people like product manufacturers or upstream makers, to easily work with to build prototypes? If not, they are missing a trick.

If sensor manufacturers follow this logic and deliver their products in a ready-to-sense prototyping format then they have the potential to become tomorrow’s market leaders. The landscape is changing around them, perfectly illustrated by how some of their customers are changing. We are now seeing non-traditional engineering firms emerging on the field of IoT play. Whether those organisations are digital agencies or one of the Big Five consultancies, for example, they are all working towards a similar goal: to connect a sensor to a connected board which transmits the ‘sensor values’ directly into software applications to build prototypes, and quickly. 

By failing fast then learning and iterating, they are able to produce an improved end product in rapid fashion. However, not all is lost – some manufacturers have seen the future and reacted accordingly. Sensirion is the world’s leading manufacturer of temperature and humidity sensors. Based in Switzerland, it actively promotes various tools to enable developers to work with its sensor hardware. 

Fast prototypes

Prototypers looking to develop remotely connected sensing devices need to consider the ‘connected’ aspect. By using a globally wirelessly connected solution with Sensirion products, you have a quick way to build prototypes that not only work anywhere in the world but also enable the easy processing and transformation of the binary data into meaningful information for any upstream IoT application. 

To realise the potential of the Internet of Things, fabrication methods must continue to reduce the size, weight, power and cost of the sensor component and system. This also applies to sensor packaging – this accounts for as much as 80% of the cost and form factor. 

With thousands of different types of sensors available, providing them to makers in an easy-to-consume format will prove valuable. So much so that those manufacturers that do work this out will surely become market leaders.