IoT Sensors and Actuators

It is hard to dispute that the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) is upon us, with more and more computing power at our fingertips and distributed pervasively in our environments, i.e. home, work, auto, and elsewhere. An important aspect of IoT that is not as often explicitly discussed is that in order to interface with the “real world,” the IoT needs transducers, both sensors and actuators. That is, sensors and actuators are what enable these pervasive computing devices with network connections to collect information (by sensing and detecting) about the real world and then affect that world accordingly via actuators.