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With all the latest fuss about the consumer-focused smart phone applications it is easy to neglect some of the more world-changing implementation of mobile phone technology. A number of innovative smart applications are really transforming the world, along with the drive to smart cities and the nascent machine-to-machine industry. Jonny Evans’ article highlights three relatively unknown but earthshakingly innovative capabilities of smart phones.
One area where smartphone applications have already started making an unexpected impact is agriculture. Monitoring systems, installed in geographically-dispersed greenhouses or farms can be controlled remotely through a smartphone to allow farmers to control feed, watch growth, water plants and more.
Another area with great potential is medicine. There’s already over 12,000 health-related apps for Apple devices, and hospitals across the planet are installing intelligent patient monitoring systems. Such systems offer real-time machine test read-outs to monitoring stations, allow patient access to multimedia, entertainment and up-to-the minute patient records. But the potential of smartphones can go much further. Smart phone applications can be used to allow stroke victims suffering aphasia to communicate with gestures.
Finally, a third area where smartphones are already beeing used with great success is warfare, and the potential application for military use. The US Army is using the iPhone and iPod touch as communication/translation devices to help communicate with locals. Furthermore, there is already some evidence that smartphones and their software can be used to guide bomb-disabling robots and to view remote video from drones, let soldiers track whereabouts of allies and adversaries on maps in real time, to chart coordinates and guide artilley fire, or to fly unmanned aerial vehicles.
The full version of Mr. Evans’ extremely interesting article can be found here.