The Internet of Things (IoT) experienced a year of forced adoption in some industries, such as healthcare, due to the global coronavirus pandemic. In a time when people around the world had to remain apart, IoT business solutions helped people connect in new ways and companies remain profitable and productive.
Looking ahead to 2021 and beyond, we anticipate significant growth and innovation in connected health, security, remote work, 5G, and artificial intelligence (AI).
The healthcare industry, in particular, was faced with the rapidly accelerated adoption of IoT business solutions due to the forced innovation brought on by the pandemic. Connected health powered by IoT has made great strides in remote patient monitoring and mobile personal emergency response systems (mPERS), and in 2021 and beyond we will see a closing of the gap between consumer-grade and medical-grade wearable technology.
The medical wearables market is expected to see a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 21.4% between 2020 and 2025. With nearly half of consumers abstaining from seeing a primary care provider for more than a year, wearable medical devices may provide a solution for insurers as the first line of defense in detecting healthcare needs. In addition, remote patient monitoring and telehealth will be here to stay after the pandemic, providing a convenient and cost-effective way of delivering care.
With the adoption of IoT business solutions not expected to slow down in the near future, security will need to remain at the forefront of IoT deployment strategies. Growth in IoT security will be fueled by government regulations that require solution providers to utilize security by design when building IoT solutions.
We expect to see security take on a bigger role in the selection of connectivity for IoT business solutions. For this reason, we anticipate increased interest in lower-power wide-area (LPWA) technology, particularly in the assets, fleet, healthcare, and industrial sectors.
One of the biggest shifts of 2020 was migrating much of the workforce to remote work during stay-at-home orders and lockdowns to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus. According to a report from Gartner, nearly 41 percent of employees will continue remote work for at least a while beyond the pandemic.
The requirements to support a large remote workforce revolve around the technology and connectivity to support all of the endpoints sharing data through the internet. It’s anticipated that IoT solutions for business continuity, such as wireless failover and cellular as primary internet connections, will play an increasingly important role in enabling this workforce trend.
While we see the potential for exciting growth and innovation in IoT business solutions for connected health, security, and remote work, we anticipate the convergence of AI and IoT and the rollout of 5G to bring about exciting advances to the IoT market in 2021 and beyond.
While consumer buzz for 5G remains strong, it holds promise for IoT business solutions as well. One of the most compelling promises of 5G in the IoT space is that it will become the standard to support LPWA networks. This, along with the ability to deploy 5G as a private network, will help ensure reliability and security for critical IoT use cases such as those in connected health.
In 2021 we will start to see AI and IoT come together to make edge computing smarter than ever. This convergence, also known as AIoT, promises to improve operational efficiency by enabling devices to monitor and analyze data at the edge so those devices can take immediate action for things like predictive maintenance in industrial IoT.
The outlook for IoT business solutions is exciting, especially with the power of emerging network technologies and the capabilities of AI. As a global leader in IoT, KORE is the partner of choice for enterprises ready to deploy, manage, and scale the next-level IoT business solutions that customers need and want.
To learn more about emerging network technologies and which one we predict will take off in 2021, view our on-demand webinar IoT Connectivity Predictions: Moving to 5G, eSIM, and Beyond