OppOrtunities and Potential of the Internet of Things for solving social issues

The Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to change society, although it is a general-purpose technology and its concrete application, value, and feasibility are still obscure. In this study, we explored plausible social issues to which IoT solutions can be applied. First, we extracted promising research areas of IoT by measuring text correlations between citation networks of papers and those of patents. Then, semantic linkages between extracted research areas and social issues were investigated. In this research, we targeted social issues proposed at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002, WEHAB (i.e. water, energy, health, agriculture, and biodiversity). On the basis of the results, we discuss potentials and challenges for IoT to solve social issues.