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Educators and students have been forced to observe lockdown due to SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic and also to rely speedily on digital technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT) so as to ensure the successful completion of the modules within the academic year (Mourtzis et al., 2021). Moreover, due to the rapid advancement in technology, there will be connection and communication among everything in this World (Chopra et al., 2019). The Internet provides the backbone of virtual communication worldwide and it is defined as “network of networks” (Chopra et al., 2019). The Internet is used to establish connections among computers globally through servers and dedicated routers.
Many researchers define Internet of Things (IoT) at the beginning as Internet of Everything, Internet of Anything, Internet of People, Internet of Signs, Internet of Services, Internet of Data or Internet of Processes (Evans, 2011; Gul et al., 2017; Chopra et al., 2019). The futurist at Cisco, Dave Evans defines IoT as a network connecting physical objects and he also uses the term Internet of Everything for both physical and virtual objects (Evans, 2011). Figure 1 illustrates Dave Evans definition of IoT.
Figure 1.
Internet of Everything (source: Evans, 2011)
The Internet of Things is the network of physical objects containing embedded technology for communicating and sensing or interacting with their internal states or the external environment (Gartner, 2017). The Internet of Things makes this communication and connection possible. It is one of the disruptive innovations challenging the World to be a complex interconnected infrastructure (Majeed & Ali, 2018). The Internet of Things is a rapidly growing network comprising of different ‘connected things’ (Gul et al., 2017).
Internet of Things has been transforming various aspects of our daily life and it is ubiquitous and encourages the development of intelligent and autonomous solutions (Aldowah et al., 2017). The Internet of Things uses the Internet as the underlying technology to enable machine-to-machine communication (M2M) (Chopra et al., 2019). Connected devises can share and communicate information that can be used for decision making (Gul et al., 2017). Technologies and concepts such as Internet of Things, cyber physical systems, were initiated from the “Industry 4.0” concept and are motivating nations for digital transformation (Akbar et al., 2018). According to Burange and Misalkar (2015), IoT is a structure in which objects, people are provided with exclusive identity and the ability to relocate data over a network without requiring two-way handshaking between human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction.
Figure 2.
Internet of Things application fields (source: Abdel-Basset et al., 2018)