As sensor technology becomes more sophisticated and smaller in size, it has become a normal aspect of business operations and data governance. According to Valuates Reports, a premium market research company, the sensor market is expected to reach $287 Billion by 2025. If you haven’t yet adopted sensor technology in your day-to-day operations, or aren’t familiar with what it can do for your business, this blog will provide you with an introduction.
What is Sensor Technology?
A sensor is a device that detects, measures and/or responds to a specified input. They are designed to collect analog data in the physical world and translate it in digital data. Sensors have played a pivotal role in the expansion of data-centric organization thinking and execution.
For instance, if you run a grocery store, you might want to pay attention to the health of your shoppers. Taking every person’s temperature as they walk through your entryway would be time-consuming and a turn-off for your customers. However, you could utilize heat sensor technology to measure each person’s temperature as they walk in, providing recordable, real-time data that can help impact your ongoing operations.
The Beginning of Sensor Technology
Sensors are not a new concept. Long before the transistor was created, canaries were used to let people know when the air was too toxic in coal mines. However, the beginning of the modern sensor was created by Andrew Ure, a Scottish chemist who, in 1830, patented a way to indicate temperature called the bimetallic thermostat.
Radar, a revolutionary technology in the mid-1900s, generated radio waves in an effort to “listen” to any potential reflections of those waves on physical objects. It was crucial to our successes in World War II as it helped identify enemy ships and aircraft.
Fortunately, for businesses, sensor technology has come a long way since then
The Internet of Things
The rising adoption of sensor technology coincides with the proliferation of the transistor. The invention of the transistor, a fundamental building block of digital electronics, kicked off what is referred to as The Information Age in the late 1900s.
As the transistor scaled down in size while simultaneously getting more powerful, technological applications flourished making sensor technology more viable and easy to utilize for modern business.
Enter the Internet of Things.
The Internet of Things (IOT) is a popularized term for the network on interconnected objects embedded with sensors, software and other tech for the purpose of collecting data. With the onset of augmented analytics capabilities and sophisticated machine learning, we have gone from a data collection age to the Age of Insight.
The Benefits of Sensor Technology
Using sensors in equipment, commercial buildings and other applications, we can derive a myriad of data trends, warnings and anomalies that allow operations managers to do their job more effectively and efficiently. Here are just a sample of the potential benefits that sensor technology and remote monitoring systems can provide:
- Predictive maintenance
- Reduced overhead
- More efficient inventory and supply chain management
- Increased customer and employee safety
- Improvement in overall quality control
- Increased organization efficiency
- Increased organization agility through smart insights
Request a Demo from Our Partner, ObservantIQ
If you would like to learn more about sensor technology and how it can help improve your business, contact our strategic partners at SureSensor. Their turnkey solution provides everything you need from sensors to a proprietary dashboard and even live monitoring associates ready to keep watch on your business 24/7.
