It is practically impossible to imagine the full potential of IoT applications. Potential applications are numerous and diverse and they go beyond of just connecting standard devices such as desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones to a network. Some applications will mature much faster than others.
Currently, there is a wide range of IoT applications covering many fields, such as smart cities, smart buildings, agriculture, car communication, transportation and mobility, smart industry, and smart health, environmental and social aspects.
The potential of IoT applications promises to transform many aspects of our lives [11]. New IoT devices like smart appliances, home automation components, and energy management devices are moving us toward a vision of the “smart home’’, offering more security and energy efficiency. Other personal IoT devices like wearable fitness and health monitoring devices and network enabled medical devices are transforming the way healthcare services are delivered. This technology promises to be beneficial for people with disabilities and the elderly, enabling improved levels of independence and quality of life at a reasonable cost. IoT systems like networked vehicles, intelligent traffic systems, and sensors embedded in roads and bridges move us closer to the idea of “smart cities’’, which help minimize congestion and energy consumption. IoT technology offers the possibility to transform agriculture, industry, and energy production and distribution by increasing the availability of information along the value chain of production using networked sensors.
A number of companies and research organizations have offered different projections about the potential impact of IoT on the Internet and the economy during the next years. Cisco, for example, projects more than 24 billion IoT objects by 2019; Morgan Stanley, however, projects 75 billion networked devices by 2020. Huawei forecasts 100 billion IoT connections by 2025. McKinsey Global Institute suggests that the financial impact of IoT on the global economy may be as much as $3.9 to $11.1 trillion by 2025. To estimate the potential economic impact of IoT across economies, McKinsey Global Institute took into account a range of IoT adoption rates, economic and demographic trends, and the likely evolution of technology over the next 10 years [12].
In the following subsections we present some of these applications which can have a great impact in our lives in a near future. This is just a limited description in order to imagine all possible new applications and services that IoT could provide.