A smart home gate capable of opening at the owner’s arrival or transforming your garage into a giant letterbox for online shopping deliveries, a real-time analysis and 3D printing solution to design and produce in-store custom made shoes within a couple of hours, a fully connected and sensorized fire truck capable of measuring resources, a smart platform to control water quality in fish farms, and a powerful platform capable of provisioning any device to any platform in just seconds. These are the first five projects announced to take part in the 2018 Internet of Things (IoT) Solutions World Congress Testbed Area. Held at Fira de Barcelona from 16 to 18 October, the event will display 10 testbeds showing how the IoT will reshape the global economy.

The smart door testbed developed by Marantec and Guh will showcase a system capable of logically responding to different situations once deployed. Doors are capable of ventilating the property if suggested by temperature and humidity sensors, combining its action with lighting control systems already in place, notifying the service technician of the exact type of error experienced, integrating a post delivery service to transform a garage into a letterbox or even installing cheap consumer charging stations into private garages and making the private garage/charging point available for the public, too. 

Danish footwear brand ECCO partners with Dassault Systèmes, the 3Dexperience Company leading the path towards sustainable innovations, will launch a data-driven experience where individual bio-mechanical data is combined with additive manufacturing to create customized shoes in the store. Through wearable sensors and in only 30 seconds, 3D scanners determine the individual orthotic fit and create a custom midsole, which is the functional heart of the shoe. Within a few hours, the customized midsoles will be materialized for selected shoes. This 3D print footwear project is disrupting the consumer goods industry, pushing the boundaries of product customization and the consumer experience.

The third testbed will showcase a smart fire truck developed by Emergency One together with Vodafone, equipped with a set of solutions that allow the automation of a series of tasks in the control panel. While RFID tags, sensors & hardware ensure all the vital equipment is on board, water sensors measure tank capacity and how much water was used in an incident. The vehicle can also report when the blue lights and sirens are on, ensuring that the teams are covered from an insurance perspective. When required, the data collected from all the sensor points on the vehicles means a post event report can be created centrally showing who was on board, how long an incident was attended for and other data required.

Zaragoza-based company Libelium will take part in the testbed area with a solution developed for ASM Afarinesh Samaneh Mehr Engineering Co’s fish farm in the Caspian coast. Libelium developed a Smart Water system to measure the water quality parameters of the fish farms in the North of the country using LorIoT communications network and Thing+ visualization. The new platform achieved its goals through sensors deployed in buoys and improved the fish farm’s productivity, diminishing casualties, and reducing costs and time.

Complex industrial IoT deployments combining sensors and cloud-based platforms are now almost as easy to set up as plug-and-play devices. Today it takes 20-40 minutes per IoT device to provision an IoT Device Management System in the Cloud and most require pre-configuration loading by original manufacturers or require a skilled security installer to manually configure it on-site. Mocana, together with Intel and ARM, have developed a system capable of setting up equipment and sensors and have them transmitting relevant data to any cloud-based platform within seconds after power-on. 

Testbeds are experimental platforms designed to implement innovative solutions and test them in real-life operating conditions. These tests explore new technologies or combinations of existing ones with the aim of creating ground-breaking products or techniques with the potential to generate new international standards. The practical applications on show at the IoT Solutions World Congress (IoTSWC) will be coordinated and supervised by the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC). 

IoTSWC is the leading event on the industrial internet and the digital transformation of business sectors, combining a congress, a commercial exhibition and test benches. Its next edition expects to gather together 300 exhibitors and 250 speakers from around the world. This year’s show is set to showcase the growth of the IoT and its widescale implementation across a range of industrial and business applications and will also demonstrate the convergence of this technology with artificial intelligence and blockchain. More than 13,000 professionals from 114 countries visited the IoTSWC 2017.