The Trivia of IoT

You know that something has become too trendy when you key in the subject and some other random item and find that you get lots of returns. So yesterday, I tried it out with IoT.

So what do you get with IoT and Bathroom? Well a polemic on the bathroom of the future. Yes, we will have smart toilets which are not only eco friendly but diagnose medical conditions: Pregnancy, bacterial conditions, PSA levels, sugar levels etc. Smart showers are already here for the eco-friendly trendy set. They minimise wasted water, go straight to the temperature that you like and give feed back via LED lights on how much water you have consumed. Then there are smart toothbrushes which give you feedback on toothbrushing technique. Finally,  there is the smart mirror. This allows you to catch up on the news and weather forecast, whilst brushing your teeth. You could also monitor any of your smart household devices, such as your smart toaster, at the same time whilst also checking incoming messages. Sounds like hell doesn't it?

So I decided IoT and Underwear would then be a suitably trivial query. Well you get responses on the usual fitness app equipped wearables for monitoring pulse and other vitals whilst exercising. There's also smart yoga pants, which provide feedback to help you form the right posture when exercising. But there is also a quite exciting smart bra device, the iTbra, which can help monitor the wearer for signs of cancer. This has the potential to replace the expensive, stressful and quite uncomfortable process of having mamograms with something which monitors circadian temperature changes to detect abnormal patterns. Apparently this is based on a proven technique which has existed for decades, but was previously too cumbersome to use, due to the need for lots of cables going to instrumentation. IoT does away with the cables and allows for a potentially more accurate test which can be completed within a few hours of monitoring.

So, I then started thinking like a teenager and yes there is a smart tampon. The my.Flow  is there to help avoid the embarassement of blood staining the wearer's clothing, which would be a mortifying experience for anyone. As a man, I don't think that I should comment any further. But moving on to men, yes you can indulge in the smart condom, or i.Con. Actually its not a condom, but a ring you can slip over the top to monitor your performance statisitics during the act of copulation. Do we need it? is it useful? I'll leave it to you to decide.

So what do we learn from this trivia and is there a serious point. Well, its obvious that soon we will not be able to escape the World of Interconnected Smart Things (WIST). It has become pervasive across almost any field that you can think of (including farm fields of course). With it comes the danger of people who want to exploit it perniciously. So we need to start thinking about protecting ourselves and privacy and security in our homes and daily lives. However, this goes beyond the simple steps of securing your WiFi, protecting your passwords and identity, to seriously ensuring that your networked home and persona are well and truly protected in a systematic way and that you have separation of "concerns" and firewalls between your virtual world and the rest of the world.