LAUSR

Out of town for the US 4 July holiday, Kyle Turner got news that no lab manager wants to hear: his freezer was dying. “I was in western Massachusetts and getting these alerts on my phone,” says Turner, who manages an evolutionary-biology laboratory at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Freezers are where life-science laboratories house the fruits of their research; to lose them is to lose everything. Turner called the technicians at the Harvard University Operations Center and asked one of the lab members still in Cambridge to be on site in case precious samples needed to be moved. And then he watched the technicians’ progress in real time, using his iPhone. “I was giving feedback remotely on everything that they were trying to fix. ‘Oh, we’ll try this, we’ll rearrange the boxes to promote air flow; we’ll try this, we’ll change the thermostat.’ And I’m looking on my phone and saying, ‘Hmm, that worked, that didn’t work.’” This remote monitoring was all thanks to a technology innovation that is sweeping the consumer marketplace and has now reached the research laboratory: the Internet of Things (IoT). The IoT is the idea that it is not just computers that can be hooked up to the Internet, but everyday objects as well. In so doing, they acquire new functionality, says Felix Wortmann, scientific director of the Bosch IoT Lab at the University of St Gallen in Switzerland, which studies the IoT and its impact on business. Add Wi-Fi and a motion sensor to a light bulb, he says, and you have a remote alarm system; add Wi-Fi to a stereo system, and you can control your music from your phone. In the consumer marketplace, the concept applies to web-connected devices such as thermostats, televisions and cars. But until a few years ago, laboratory equipment could not be linked in the same way. The emergence of connected instruments and equipment promises to untether researchers from the laboratory — letting them fine-tune experiments and analyse data remotely. It allows lab managers to monitor instrument use and catch potential equipment failures before they happen. But security and economic concerns, and the inevitable teething pains that are inherent in any evolving technology, are moderating enthusiasm.