One of the winners in the latest round of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Grand Challenges Explorations was a startup that builds low cost sensors to help farmers get more accurate weather data at a cheaper price point. Groundtruth, one example of an emerging class of “internet of things” — or IoT — companies, will combine satellite data with information gathered from ground sensors and mobile phones to measure rainfall and inform index insurance schemes.
Expected to reach 25 billion connected devices by 2020, the IoT market has implications that extend far beyond tracking your steps, and it is just starting to realize its potential to address global poverty by helping the international development community narrow the gap between data and action.
“Adding electronic sensors, connected over the cellular networks to Internet databases available globally, can help draw attention to, and incentivize, fixing what we might call the ‘internet of broken things,’” said Evan Thomas, the Portland, Oregon-based director of SweetSense Inc., which developments and implements cellular based monitoring technologies for global health programs.