It’s safe to call the Internet of Things (IoT) a fact of life with a projection that there will be around 17 billion devices in 20241. And unlike some sectors, exponential growth isn’t leading to rapid stagnation. IoT is constantly advancing, and ground-shaking innovations are par for the course.
2024 is already shaping up to deliver major transformations, and big things are happening at the broader societal level. Here are four trends to look out for in the days to come:
Architectures Become More Flexible
As technology evolves and becomes more diverse, the demand to create more cohesive networks that developers can seamlessly build across various platforms will become more prevalent.
Open-sourced architecture has become a winning solution. By allowing collaboration, improvements, and flexibility, developers can use open-source architectures to adapt to their application’s specific needs. This results in agile environments, higher scalability, and continuous improvements.
Recently, Xiaomi announced the Vela Platform at their IoT Ecological partner conference. The Vela platform is an embedded software platform built on the open-source real-time operating system NuttX. Vela provides unified software services on various IoT hardware platforms, supporting multiple components and a user-friendly framework to integrate fragmented IoT application scenarios.
It has a range of tools that help developers debug and is already picking up support from big names in integrated circuits including Ambiq with our Apollo4 Blue Display Kit designed to show off the graphical and technical capabilities of our system on chips (SoCs) for IoT devices.
Ultra-low Power Consumption Will Start to Become the Norm
AI is becoming increasingly integral to business workflows. However, depending on an external cloud isn’t always viable when your sensors and other assets are on-premises. If your sector leans heavily on IoT devices, you’ll have to rethink how you use power to keep up.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is known for consuming massive amounts of power. While the training phase commonly shoulders most of the blame, studies show that inference is also energy-hungry2. This doesn’t bode well for use cases like stock management, early disease diagnosis, and other innovative applications.
Ultra-low-power SoCs will take center stage in the push for IoT-powered AI sustainability. The increasing availability of AI-enabled edge devices will only spur demand. Low-voltage technology like Ambiq’s Subthreshold Power Optimized Technology (SPOT®) has proven that high-end computing is possible without massive energy consumption. Now, it’s just a matter of putting the pieces together.
IoT Cybersecurity Will Blossom for Edge Devices
AI is a powerful tool, so what happens when it winds up in the wrong hands? Unfortunately, we’re already starting to see the ramifications play out. AI-generated hacks are emerging among the biggest cybersecurity threats of the modern era.
AI can make finding exploits far less time-consuming and effective. Worse, the wide accessibility of cloud technology makes it all the more appealing to cyber criminals3. This is already happening in the consumer sector, with potentially devastating results. Email security provider Egress revealed that AI makes phishing campaigns harder to detect4. It’s also helping bad actors sidestep quarantines and detectors.
The good news is that fighting fire with fire could be a valid defense. ML models like support vector machines and random forests have been shown to detect suspicious activity with high accuracy and efficient memory usage5. If your most vulnerable assets become compromised, embedding AI-capable hardware right on the edge could be an effective countermeasure to regain control over those assets or minimize the damage.
Regulations May Grow Sharper Teeth
While not an exciting trend, IoT regulatory compliance is becoming more of a necessity by the second. Governments may be warming up to IoT like never before, but they haven’t thrown all caution to the wind.
In early December 2023, the US Office of Management and Budget (OMB) exemplified this in a new guidance. To comply with the OMB’s rules, federal agencies must provide detailed inventories of their IoT devices by the end of fiscal year 20246.
The US wasn’t the only nation to move in this direction. In October, the UK government finalized a sweeping set of security regulations for connectable products — devices that either connect to the internet or send and receive data via EM transmissions7. These rules targeted manufacturers, covering everything from password strength to updates.
It wouldn’t be surprising to see vendors face similar requirements. Also, data privacy laws like the EU’s GDPR have long since established that being a foreign-domiciled enterprise doesn’t exempt you from compliance burdens. Regulatory crackdowns don’t necessarily mean application growth has to slow; it just needs a more comprehensive approach to governance. Hardware vendors can and should play a role in this journey.
How Ambiq is Contributing
These predictions aren’t exclusive to 2024. They’ll continue to pose concerns in the years to follow — and waiting to play catch up isn’t quite a winning strategy.
Ambiq’s ultra-low power portfolio empowers you to meet increased processing demand and adapt to the changing landscape. From driving Arm® Cortex® M4 energy consumption lower than thought possible with the Apollo4 Blue Plus SoC to ensuring always-on devices live up to their name. We’re helping IoT reach its true potential. Dive into our catalog to find out more.
Sources:
1 Internet of Things (IoT) in the US – statistics & facts | December 19, 2023
2 OMB guidance asks agencies to provide inventory of IoT assets | December 6, 2023
3 Prepare for AI Hackers | March-April 2023
4 2023 Phishing Threat Trends Report | 2023
5 Detecting Cybersecurity Attacks in Internet of Things Using Artificial Intelligence Methods: A Systematic Literature Review | January 10, 2022
6 The growing energy footprint of artificial intelligence | October 18, 2023
7 UK government finalises IoT cybersecurity requirements | October 25, 2023
