Fujitsu Forum – A humble lightbulb shows the good and bad of IoT

 As a follow up to the oft-quoted wisdom that the applications and implications of the Internet of Things (IoT) are limited solely by human imagination, the annual question and answer session held at the Fujitsu Forum in Munich by Fujitsu’s Chief Technology Officer, Dr Joseph Reger, contained a cameo about IoT that demonstrates well what its implications could be.

Those implications play strongly to the company’s new stated position of wanting to be as human-centric as possible. As Reger showed, IoT is likely to have significant impact in creating that human centricity.  

Something of a free-thinker who is not afraid to speak his mind speculate on possibilities – many of them more plausible than many actually think possible, Reger jumped at a question about IoT. His cameo, a tale about a humble light bulb, served as an excellent object lesson in how IoT can be exploited both for good and ill.  

The light bulb in question is not a product – yet, but probably will be in the not too distant future. Its key differentiator is that it publishes an IP address, which instantly prompts the question as to why anyone would want to do that. There are good reasons, however, as Reger pointed out.

Ironicallym the most important difference about the bulb initially looks like a negative. If publishing an IP address is to be useful then the bulb has to be `on’ all the time, and therefore using electricity all the time. But to counter that users can write any number of services that the bulb itself can run.

For example, it would be a simple matter for a smartphone routine to detect a user’s location, and send the bulbs a message to turn on or off, according to need or some predetermined policy or action plan. It can even be coupled with people position sensors and light level detectors so that the use of lighting and electricity can be optimised automatically.

So, even though the bulbs would be always `on’ power consumption could be reduced by automatically removing the human tendency to leave lights on because `I’ll be back in a minute. The bulbs only consume around 20mW of power when not emitting light.

The bulbs could, of course, also detect and report on their own state, predicting the onset of obvious failure modes. That reporting could then be acted upon, in some way. It could for example, report to a user’s mobile phone of an upcoming failure. If that phone detected it was passing a hardware store, it could then contact the house gateway system to check on the status of all lightbulbs and that failing bulb could notify the user of its state. That would allow a spare bulb to be bought on the equivalent of a Just In Time manufacturing model.

The lightbulb could even play a part in health care, as Reger pointed out. For example, if it is in the home of an elderly person who, say, normally gets up at 6.30am and makes a cup of tea, the sequence of lightbulb instances can be monitored – as, of course can the kettle and other kitchen implements involved. Breaking that sequence could indicate a problem, which could then prompt a response such as getting a relative or carer to call and check up.

As this is IT there is a potential downside, of course. Reger observed that because the lightbulb has an IP address it can be identified, accessed and infiltrated by those with appropriate knowledge and tools. In practice, that means that hackers could attack all the lightbulbs in the world, inserting malicious code into these `intelligent’ devices so that they can be used to, say, launch a denial of service attack using billions of `soldiers’.

This opens up whole new areas for hackers to consider, and security services providers to start planning their defences. According to Reger, current estimates suggest that there could be around 50 billion devices on the Internet by 2020. The `good’ side of this, in Fujitsu terms, is that it offers enormous potential for making the technology human centric, where the work is done by the devices, but it is done for the people. 

It does, however, also open up a new and all-pervasive frontier in the battle to keep systems, processes and data secure from malicious miss-use.