Can Japan Get Her Groove Back With IoT?
Japan, which once looked like a world leader as it pushed its Home Energy Management System (HEMS) and the smart home standard, is now trying to get her groove back via the Internet of Things.
If last week’s conference programs and exhibits at Embedded Technology 2014 show here were any indication, Japan’s M2M, HEMS, and Echonet Lite programs have been rebranded as a part of the IoT effort.
In the late 1990s, NTT Docomo talked about how the communication traffic of the future would be driven by machines calling up other machines (M2M) to help humans without human involvement.
Backed by the Japanese government, Japanese companies established Echonet (later, Echonet Lite), communication protocols for linking appliances made by different manufacturers — a decade before the emergence of Apple’s HomeKit and Google’s Thread.