ement parts in the price of a machine.
"Companies like Kaeser Compressor in Germany, which traditionally made and sold compressed air machines, are now able to offer compressed air as a service and charge customers by the liter of compressed air consumed," Miller said. "Consumables, spare parts, servicing and even the machine itself are only paid for when they're needed and used."
RFID and IoT
RFID tags are IoT sensors that collect data about the specific object to which a tag is attached. Commonly used in supply chain management, ID badging and access control, RFID tagging involves sending data using specific radio wave emissions.
RFID has two forms, Chandler said: active and passive. An active RFID tag contains an onboard power supply, enabling a tag to communicate data at any time and over larger distances. A passive RFID tag may not communicate unless it is activated by a radio frequency emission. It then uses the radio wave captured by the antenna in the tag to activate data collection and power the return communication path.
The future of smart sensors
Forrester Research predicts that smart sensor-based, track-and-trace and smart products will be the fastest-growing use cases, with 24.2% and 24% compound annual growth rates respectively. But the applications won't stop there.
"Sensors are increasingly being built into products at the point of manufacture," Miller said. "Industrial equipment, trains, planes and buildings increasingly arrive with hundreds or even thousands of sensors already connected."
However, internet of things sensors aren't limited to only new products.
"In markets like industrial manufacturing, where machines may have a life span measured in decades, there's also a healthy market in retrofitting sensors to older equipment," Miller said, noting that lowered sensor costs combined with the growing prevalence of infrastructure that can support IoT data flows will result in companies deploying sensors in greater numbers.
"Where today, a logistics company might install sensors in a truck, tomorrow it may be cost-effective to install sensors in every pallet or even every package," Miller said.
The arrival of 5G, he added, will eventually make it easier to work with a large number of sensors, even in environments where data latency causes problems today.
Also of note is the increased use of edge computing. As more analytics, including the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence, is run at the point of data collection, organizations -- or the sensors themselves or the IoT edge gateways the sensors connect to -- will be able to make decisions faster and more effectively.
Chandler noted that the continued miniaturization of sensors will change the future sensor landscape.
"Sensors will continue to get smaller over time and more capable in terms of computational capability," he said.
Sensors will also offer more functions in the same platform, serving different sensing categories from the same devices.
"Sensors will be installed in more and more devices, with everything from wearables to special-purpose sensors linking observations from our environment to a computing platform," Chandler said. "Estimates from pundits in the industry expect that the total number of IoT devices -- and, thus, possible sensors -- will triple in the next six years, with roughly 25 billion devices today, growing to 75 billion devices in 2025."
Additional reporting by Jim O'Donnell.
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