Imagine a world where someone with a serious health condition could step into a friend’s house and have their thermostat automatically adjust the temperature to a level that will help them feel comfortable.
Or a scenario where a cell phone grid goes down during a major disaster but emergency personnel can still communicate with one another via wifi and Bluetooth enabled devices.
These are each situations that Dr. YunusDurmuş considered while working on his dissertation at TU Delft. As part of the Department of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, and Computer Science,he earned his PhD in early Octoberfor his dissertation entitled “Autonomous Cooperation in The Internet of Things”.
While conducting his research, Durmuş examined multiple components of the Internet of Things (IoT). This is the term that has been given to a field that encompasses the incorporation and collaborative abilities of electronics, sensors, and software across various networks.
Future advancements in IoT could help these components learn from each other and share information in order to make tasks simpler and help improve the quality of life of people all over the world. British technological pioneer Kevin Ashton coined the term in 1999 when wifi-connected devices were still at least a half decade away from becoming common household products.
Now IoT is slowly becoming commonplace as well and, according to one estimate, over 50 billion different devices and objects could make use of this technology by the year 2020. While working on his dissertation, Durmuş studied everything from heart monitors to light bulbs to see how they could collaborate with one another and complete different tasks.
“It can be a thermostat, it can be heart monitors, smartphones, TVs, and more,” Durmuş said. “When they share their resources with each other they will be able to create better applications for consumers.”
In addition to working on software that might help a heart monitor exchange information with a thermostat in order to adjust a room’s temperature to accommodate someone’s needs, he also examined how wifi and Bluetooth enabled devices might be able to dispatch messages during an emergency or a period of network failure.
“A phone won’t be able to reach a [cellular tower] if there’s no connection,” he said. “But a Bluetooth device, depending on the situation, can reach another device roughly ten metres away. If there are enough devices close by, they can help each other and extend their coverage to one kilometre away. A message could even go from one device and then be resent to another device and reach far longer distances.”
The applications of this technology could be far reaching. Durmuş plans to further explore the potentials of IoT as he continues his career.
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