”The Internet of Things” was the key topic at a...

people communicating with each other,” said Cisco Senior Director of Tech Policy Jeff Campbell, “but also the things talking to each other” and a part of the equation is getting “enough devices talking to each other.” Cisco projects there'll be 50 billion connected devices by 2020 and “we have to start thinking about what the devices are going to do as designed by themselves going forward,” he said, speaking of myriad applications. Richard Adler, people & technology principal at the Institute for the Future, said he sees a change from an era where “these machines didn’t know anything” to an intimate, physical manifestation of that digital world. “It’s bringing together those two worlds,” the digital world and “the physical world.” Much better, richer data will also be made available and come with “enormously exciting” potential, Adler said. Ericsson Innovation Head Gabriel Broner considered the way different players in the healthcare industry could get involved and said “the incentives must be aligned.” Campbell and Adler agreed in multi-stakeholder governance and the market guiding the Internet of Things rather than any one authority, whereas Broner said, “Perhaps there needs to be a trusted entity that’s going to be collecting data and going to have rules on how they make that data available. But this is a barrier ... People don’t want their personal data broadcast to the world.”