What Does Smart in Smartphone Stand for
What is a smart device? — The key concept of the Internet of Things
A conceptualization of the term smart device
Smart devices play a fundamental role in today's Industry 4.0. They are at the center of the Internet of Things (IoT) and smart cities. Smart devices were the center of my PhD investigation a few years ago. However, when I was trying to find a definition for smart devices, not many sources showed up.
I could only find one Wikipedia article with a not certain definition. I resorted to creating a definition for a smart device. I create a methodological and replicable approach for developing a scalable concept of smart device, ending up with the following definition:
" A smart device is a context-aware electronic device capable of performing autonomous computing and connecting to other devices wire or wirelessly for data exchange" (See full journal paper here).
This definition proposed that a smart device has three main features, namely, context-awareness, autonomous computing, and connectivity. This definition complies with the main idea of the IoT which is that Any "thing" can be part of the IoT. A chair can become a smart chair if we add a sensor, a tiny bit of computing capabilities and network connectivity.
Context-awareness
According to this article, context-awareness is:
The ability of a system or system component to gather information about its environment at any given time and adapt behaviors accordingly.
Cameras, microphones and Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) receivers, radar and LIDAR sensors are all potential sources of data for context-aware computing. A context-aware system may gather data through these and other sources and respond according to pre-established rules or through computational intelligence.
Autonomous computing
The key aspect of autonomous computing is a device or multiple devices performing tasks autonomously without the direct command of the user. For example, when our smartphones make a suggestion based on our geolocation or the weather. For doing this "simple" task a smartphone needs to be autonomous and used context-data to make decisions.
Connectivity
Connectivity refers to the ability of a smart device to connect to a data network. Without connectivity, there is no point in a smart device being autonomous and having context-awareness. Network connectivity is a crucial feature which enables a device to be a part of the Internet of Things. Network connectivity can be wired or wireless.
What about user interaction?
Don't make the mistake of assuming all smart devices are designed for the only purpose of interacting with a human. If you think that is because you are only thinking of the most common smart devices, such as smartphones, smart TVs, smartwatches. There are so many more possibilities. A smart device can have direct or indirect interaction with humans. Weather probe, for example, might collect weather data and transmit it to the IoT. Humans will end up using that data of course, but the weather probe did not require any direct interaction with humans.
And what about portability?
Does a smart surveillance camera need to be mobile? Remember the three rules: context-awareness (it's a camera, so check), autonomous computing (is uses computer vision to recognize particular objects), and network connectivity (it sends a report of the objects recognized to a server). In this example, portability was not needed. However, a sub-category might be mobile smart devices.
Is an autonomous vehicle a smart device?
Definitely yes. It complies with the three key criteria previously explained. It has network connectivity (wired or wirelessly), context-awareness(sensors such as GPS, LIDAR and Radar), and autonomous computing.
In the end, a smartphone might be a lot simpler than an autonomous vehicle but they are still both smart devices. For more on key aspects of autonomous vehicle see this article.
Conclusions
We have seen that network connectivity, context-awareness, and autonomous computing are the key aspects for a device to be considered a smart device. Nevertheless, this is not a widely used terminology (yet).
A few years ago when I created the definition of smart device I surveyed the whole literature on this subject area. I found out a huge lack of agreement in terminology. Some papers might say "smart mobile device", others "mobile smart device", or "smart green IT device" (and the list goes on). Personally, I do not consider this to be a problem. We just need to be open-minded about the idea that some people might refer to a device as a "mobile device" or "smart IT device". In the end, what matters is understanding what makes a smart device, smart.
What Does Smart in Smartphone Stand for
Source: https://towardsdatascience.com/what-is-a-smart-device-the-key-concept-of-the-internet-of-things-52da69f6f91b
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