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The Internet of Things is changing the face of industry and bringing new benefits to consumers by connecting machines, devices, wearables, vehicles, home appliances, and just about every other electronic device. In fact, McKinsey & Company estimates that IoT could generate anywhere from $3.9 trillion to $11.1 trillion in value by 2025. Connected machines are already making positive waves in factories. In the home, IoT-enabled lights and door locks, for example, allow users to customize settings with their smartphones and other devices.
Starsky Robotics, a semi-autonomous robotic truck company based in Florida, provides a glimpse of the near future with systems that allow truckers to monitor multiple self-driving trucks at a time as they travel highways, and take over control when needed for the last mile of deliveries or pickups.
Robotic delivery vehicles now in production also bring deliveries directly to customers from retailers and grocery stores. Marble and Starship are just two of the ventures building sidewalk robots set to bring the store home in greater numbers in the coming year. And Next Future Transportation, a company based in Italy, has begun trials of autonomous mini-buses that dynamically link up and separate to send goods or up to ten passengers at a time to side destinations along the main route. IoT and a smartphone app make all of this possible.
But IoT-driven transportation and delivery need not wait for autonomous vehicles. Mutual Mobile has built a car lease-alternative system for dribe in Denmark. Thanks to IoT-connected cars, customers can select their cars online, unlock them with their smartphones, and drive them away on demand. They can even swap out cars for different models as their wants or needs change. The system tells customers when to bring their cars in for maintenance, tracks mileage, and can even disable stolen cars.
Flexdrive car subscription service in the U.S. and monitoring for AGCO agricultural equipment such as tractors.
![></p><p>IoT fr fleet management</p><p>Car lease alternative system dribe. Powered by Mutual Mobile</p><p>Another key to the growing success of these systems, says Buyse, are easy-to-use apps and interfaces, which only recently have become a priority for manufacturers. “The state of IoT at the hardware level is very high,” says Buyse, but only recently has the software behind it begun to reach parity. Adoption, he says, is “really about the UX [user experience].”</p><h2>Personal IoT</h2><p>Nowhere is the user experience more important than in the realm of consumer devices. And, as it happens, the biggest near-term impacts for IoT will occur on the consumer front.</p><p>Consumer devices already make up the majority of IoT devices, with 5.2 billion devices in 2017 jumping to 7 billion in 2018, and exploding to 12.8 billion in 2020, according to <strong><a href=](https://assets-global.website-files.com/6343ef968b05c90cc51512d3/6343ef968b05c9616c151c70_6024e6c11f0b97a5afa71bfd_dribe-2.jpeg)
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