Generally speaking, the IoT benefits a process in any of eight different ways:

1.  Customer Service/Experience

A business needs customers in order to survive, so in order to keep clients and customers coming back, their experience needs to be good enough to convince them to do so. The IoT offers a lot of opportunities to assist you in this goal, from the credit card readers that plug into a mobile device to the solutions that allow a shipment to be tracked and automatically notify the customer of their purchase’s process. Basically, the IoT can be used to help your processes and more efficiently supply the service or product that is desired.

2.  Business Opportunities and Potential Revenue

It doesn’t matter how quickly your team is able to complete a given process, eliminating that process from their responsibilities through automation allows them to use their time better. In a way, this allows you to accomplish twice as much in the same amount of time, increasing your business’ scope and generating more revenues.

3.  Workplace Safety

The IoT can be used to minimize the health and safety risks that some workplaces inherently have. Through data collection and analytics, you can effectively predict a number of issues and proactively mitigate them. Security solutions with IoT integrations can increase your trust in your defenses, with protections like video surveillance and identity authentication measures preventing most threats.

4.  Productivity

Most businesses have “productivity” high on their internal list of priorities, something that the Internet of Things can be used to accomplish. As mentioned above, the IoT makes many of your team’s tasks far more efficient and can sometimes free them of some responsibilities, allowing them to spend their time on more productive goals. When your time-consuming tasks are taken out of the way, your team is free to innovate and thrive. As a bonus, certain IoT tools can help schedule your activities to take full advantage of productivity trends.

5.  Analytics

One of the most important aspects to fulfilling a client or customer’s needs is how well you are able to predict them. After you have collected assorted data from your past clientele using the IoT, the IoT can help you further by compiling this data and concentrating it into actionable insights. Whether you’re looking at population trends or what an individual customer is likely to do next, these kinds of analytics can help you make the predictions you need to prepare accordingly.

6.  Cost Efficacy

I know I don’t need to remind you of how crucial it is to pull every bit of value from the investments your business makes into its operations. Using analytical processes to dictate their use of the IoT, various business expenses can be optimized. Furthermore, unnecessary and avoidable costs like those incurred through downtime can be avoided, thereby reducing the total bill without making sacrifices.

7.  Data Functions

Data plays a key role in all industries, so the data collection and tracking capabilities of the IoT are of great use in a wide variety of applications. From predictive analytics to optimizing operations, the IoT provides the information that businesses use in their considerations. This makes it easier to work on this proactively, and the predictions made become more accurate over time.

8.  Opportunities for Smart Devices

Smart devices are appearing more and more often, allowing many industries to enjoy added capabilities in their operations. As these devices only become more prevalent, the IoT will be needed to collect and process the data that these endpoints generate.

Technologies like the Internet of Things and many others can benefit businesses in many ways. For assistance in identifying and adopting the advancements best suited for your needs, give Patriot Tech Services Inc. a call at 877-874-4629.

While this may just seem to be a mildly amusing annoyance, this phenomenon has some concerning security ramifications. Let’s discuss how deep the rabbit hole goes, and what the impact could be to your security.

What Do Our Smart Assistants Actually Hear?

You’re certainly aware by now of how these smart assistants work. A small device lives in your home or office, either as a standalone device or piggybacked into your phone or other appliance. With a simple voice command, assorted information can be shared or activities can be completed with little effort. By default, this voice command is dictated by which device is being used:

• Amazon Alexa devices respond to the term “Alexa,” ”Computer,” ”Amazon,” or “Echo.”
• Google Home devices wake up to “Okay/Hey, Google.”
• Apple’s Siri responds to “Hey Siri.”
• Microsoft’s Cortana reacts to its name, “Cortana,” or “Hey, Cortana.”

However, we’ve all also seen examples of these smart assistants picking up other sounds when we aren’t expecting it to react. How often have you seen someone say something, only to be interrupted as their smart assistant responds?

To be honest with yourself, how often have you been the one to say the wrong thing and trigger an out-of-context response?

You are far from alone. Many people have done the same, and there are some legitimate security concerns paired to this phenomenon. In fact, these incorrect wake words have even inspired academic research.

The Research

In their report, Unacceptable, where is my privacy? Exploring Accidental Triggers of Smart Speakers, researchers used a variety of smart devices to listen to various samples of audio material, including popular television shows like Modern Family and Game of Thrones, news broadcasts, as well as the professional audio data used to train these speakers.

With this approach, the researchers analyzed when the terms that successfully activated the assistants were spoken, ultimately generating a list of over a thousand audio sequences. From there, they were even able to break down the words into their individual sounds and identify other potential false triggers that also activated the voice assistants.

For instance, depending on the pronunciation of the word, the following substitutions awakened the voice assistants:

• Alexa devices also responded to “unacceptable” and “election,” while “tobacco” could stand in for the wake word “Echo.” Furthermore, “and the zone” was mistaken for “Amazon.”
• Google Home devices would wake up to “Okay, cool.”
• Apple’s Siri also reacted to “a city.”
• Microsoft’s Cortana could be activated by “Montana.”

This phenomenon was not only found in devices trained in English, either. Speakers set to German and some from Chinese manufacturers set to Chinese were also tested, with some samples being more resistant to accidental activation, while some new examples proved very effective—for instance, the German phrase for “On Sunday” (“Am Sonntag”) was commonly mistaken for “Amazon.”

What This Means to Privacy

While the results of this study are fascinating, the true purpose is more disconcerting. Let’s go back to the way these assistants work.

As we said, once the wake word or phrase is recognized by the device, it actively begins listening. In an ideal world, the assistant would only recognize the predetermined words and activate when those specific words were spoken. However, we know that isn’t the case, as this study proves.

So, now we have a situation in which there are devices scattered around, waiting for something close enough to their trigger word to register. Keep that in mind.

We have also mentioned that this data is transcribed and reviewed manually to check for accuracy, which means that another person could potentially be given access to the recording. While we obviously can’t say that we know that one of these people could use this access to their own, personal advantage, we also can’t say that we know they wouldn’t.

Let’s put together a scenario: you’re on the phone with a coworker, talking about a client. Your coworker needs access to the client’s data, so you give them the access credentials to do so. Trouble is, at some point in the conversation, your smart assistant heard a potential trigger word and started recording.

As a result, there is now a recording of your client’s account credentials in the cloud, and potentially being anonymously reviewed by a complete stranger. Setting aside the workplace for a moment, how easily do you think it could be that a smart assistant could pick up some other piece of juicy or embarrassing personal information?

While we aren’t trying to scare you away from using smart speakers, we are trying to demonstrate how important it is that you use them mindfully. There unfortunately is not an option to use a customized word to register that the speaker should listen in (as of yet), so for right now, just try to be more aware of what you’re saying when you’re within “earshot” of them. That, and you should make it a habit to disable the device when not in use, and especially when discussing sensitive information.

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Electronic Health Records were developed to enhance the speed that health care organizations could see patients, get them the care they need, and get paid. With so many moving parts, the EHR would change the face of healthcare, but have they been consistently updated to give patients control over their experiences with their healthcare providers? Not always. 

There are a couple of reasons for this. The first is that the EHR, while being a platform that could do a lot for a patient, was actually designed to streamline patient care and keep costs from inflating too much. Neither has really worked as costs continue to rise and EHRs aren’t always up to date with all relevant information. Another is a result of cost inflation: many healthcare facilities are being sold to larger healthcare providers and then being dismantled. These mergers and acquisitions dictate that any EHR functionality be consolidated, making cost too prohibitive to innovate. Furthermore, every major EHR system is highly proprietary, making interoperability with other systems a non-starter for many EHR companies. 

Regardless of the reasons why innovation isn’t happening, it’s not. There are many technologies that have been developed in the past decade that could be worked into the EHR to give patients more control over their own health data, but without consistent upgrades made to the EHR systems these opportunities are lost. 

Governments from all over the world have spent a lot of money attempting to promote the use of the EHR. The thought behind it is intriguing. A digital file where every piece of data that is needed by healthcare providers to give the best patient care, as well as a way to connect insurers into the process to ensure that these providers get paid. During the last economic downturn in 2009, the HITECH Act was passed with billions of dollars going to healthcare providers in order for them to upgrade away from the file folder system that doctors had been using for decades prior.

In those 11 years, many organizations that implemented EHR systems haven’t upgraded them. Imagine if you were using a piece of software that was developed 11 years ago? Microsoft just retired Windows 7 support forever. That OS was released in 2009. The point here is that in order for the healthcare system to innovate, it will take an investment by healthcare providers to continue to push the envelope by implementing software that is on the cutting edge, not trying to patch software that should have been replaced three times over. 

Modern EHR solutions have some of the most innovative tools right down to active imaging and reporting. There are solutions today using IoT sensors that can tell doctors and nurses everything they need to know about a patient so that their time is used resourcefully. It’s a shame that people are stuck paying some healthcare providers exorbitant costs while they use technology from yesteryear. 

If your medical practice is looking to make an investment in their patient’s ability to take control of their health, call the IT professionals at 877-874-4629 to talk about how we can help you innovate your EHR platform today.