The IoT market is booming, and with the advent of 5G, it’s moving fast. Here are three emerging trends for 2022.

Trend 1 -Me of Things

Me of Things are sensors that you wear or that will be in your vicinity. One example is sleep pattern sensors that can be embedded in your bed or pillow. The sensors help you understand your sleep patterns to help you sleep better. But they can also interact with other smart systems in your home to optimise the climate in your bedroom or dim the lights on all your devices before bedtime.
Me of Things can also be sensors embedded in ordinary devices that we use near ourselves, such as wireless headphones that we use when listening to music. These could in the future have sensors to better understand what mood you are in, so that they could, for example, tell Spotify which song to play next instead of just using an algorithm based on past playbacks.

Me of things


With Me of Things and small sensors comes the possibility of building sensors into the outside of your headphones, such as the ones in the paragraph above. This way it is also possible to understand the temperature around us. That way, the heating system can more easily detect if the room is too cold or too hot and learn from your surroundings.

Trend 2 – health

Trend two is in some ways related to the “Me of Things”. Sensors that we wear to understand our health will be used much more widely than today, because most of these systems that are monitored by professionals today are aimed at patients, people with diseases, and they have someone monitoring their health using these sensors. In the future, these sensors will be worn by many more people, and not only by the old and the sick, but also by healthy people. This can be used to get early indications of health problems.

Another element, also related to health, is air quality, which will be very important. Today, clean water is something that everyone knows is very important. But after the COVID pandemic, clean air will be very, very important also for workplaces, public places and urban transport. If you commute to work, you want to know if the air quality is good or bad to stop the spread of diseases. In the UK, there are already rules requiring workplaces to monitor air quality (CO2), all to reduce the spread of viruses.

Trend 3-smart sensors

Smart sensors that can make decisions at the edges of the network rather than sending everything to the cloud, but rather make informed decisions before they are sent. The data they send is thus filtered out. There is no need to send unimportant and unnecessary data. This has been in the works for a while, but with new low-power processors, it’s finally possible. These sensors are getting smarter and will soon be equipped with AI. This will allow the sensor to learn, for example, what type of machine it is connected to. And after it has analysed the normal pattern of that machine, it can better understand anomalies to relay that indicate that things are not as they should be.