Internet of Behavior (IoB): What it is, and How It’s Affecting Businesses in the Post-Pandemic World
Internet of Behavior (IoB) is one of the top tech trends for 2021. IoB revolves around technologies that focus on an individual, like facial recognition or location tracking, and matches the collected data against certain activities performed by this individual, such as device usage or purchase history. Companies can use this information to impact human behavior — for example, control via computer vision whether employees are wearing masks. According to Gartner forecasts, half of the world’s population will be involved in at least one IoB program by the end of 2025.
Internet of Behavior at a Glance
As an extension of IoT, the Internet of Behavior combines three fields — technology, data analytics, and behavioral science. On the technology level, IoB comprises solutions that focus on individual experiences such as location tracking, facial recognition, and telehealth solutions.
In a real-world context, a smartphone can track your location, online movements, interests, and dislikes. A health app monitors data specific to each user — heart rate, sleep patterns, and blood sugar. Smartphones, laptops, voice assistants, and in-home cameras are easy to connect. The aggregation of devices creates new data sources that contain unique, actionable insights about user behavior and preferences.
The use of the Internet of Things in business, focusing on user behavior, helps impact customer choices. Gained insights let companies introduce personalized content, create targeted advertising campaigns, improve messaging strategies, evaluate the effectiveness of marketing activities, and even ideate new products and services.
Here Are Just a Few Possibilities for Using Internet of Behavior in Marketing, Sales, and the Workplace
1. The Internet of Behavior has the potential to replace multiple customer surveys. Web and mobile apps can monitor anything from dietary choices to online purchases, thus introducing vast amounts of real-time data for analysis. This information helps improve existing products and services and even inspires the creation of new ones.
2. Data from IoT solutions help make predictions about user choices and conditions like the state of their health and travel destinations. This can come in the form of health apps that don’t replace a doctor or fitness instructor but can reveal situations related to specific health issues. Sensors added to various objects in the physical world like watches or cars introduce new data collection channels.
In particular, fitness trackers with chest straps, gyroscopes, and various sensors monitor multiple health parameters. An example of this is an athlete wearing smart apparel that measures heart rate, daily step count, and calories burned. Machine learning algorithms are here to collect this data and, after being trained, predict unsafe health conditions to alert users.
Simultaneously, travel apps like Booking collect data on the destination-specific experiences of their users, visited attractions, and activities they participated in. Datasets about past online behavior and various characteristics help companies optimize the user experience and offer relevant products and services on the go.
3. The IoB concept can reveal behavioral patterns of employees and even impact worker behavior. On the one hand, solutions like facial recognition systems positively impact security within office buildings. On the other, they offer a way to control employees within the workplace and even beyond. Intel deployed a facial recognition system to identify workers and detect individuals that may pose a threat. In the meantime, the accounting firm PwC launched a facial recognition tool for financial institutions to monitor employees working from home.
How COVID-19 Changed User Behavior and How It Affected Businesses
Since the pandemic, user behavior has changed significantly as people were forced to practice social distancing and self-isolate. According to an NCBI study, researchers saw “an inevitable surge in the use of digital technologies.” It forced companies to shift their priorities, practices and even revamp their entire business strategies. For example, some companies turned to facial recognition tools instead of fingerprint scanners for building access control.
COVID-19 recast tech trends for 2021, which now cover three main topics — people centricity, resilient delivery, and location independence, according to Gartner. The spread of the Internet of Behavior solutions is in the list of emerging technologies to watch today and beyond.
Many aspects of users’ behavioral patterns have been significantly modified, for example:
1. Increased role of the internet for work, play, and connection.
Different communication types — connection to family, friends, and colleagues — went online simultaneously with the necessity to self-isolate. This brought to the table the need to use various private and business applications to interact and continue with job responsibilities from home. The popularity of video call solutions increased, along with the demand for quality: for example, Zoom tracked 300 million daily meeting participants in April 2020, which was a 30x increase in usage compared to December 2019.
As a result, video conferencing traffic has risen, volumes of online and cloud gaming have grown, and even traffic from the use of social media platforms has increased. According to a GlobalWebIndex survey, one of the few accelerated behaviors since April 2020 is creating and uploading videos on TikTok. What does it all mean for brands? It’s time for marketers to adapt to changing habits and modify their messages accordingly.
2. Tech-driven impact on human behavior.
In the post-pandemic times, IoT solutions help monitor whether employees are wearing masks, control access to buildings or restricted areas depending on visitors’ body temperature, or even track real-time locations to check if users are following lockdown regulations.
In particular, thermal imaging and face recognition systems help detect people with high body temperature and individuals without face masks. One of the examples is a contactless AI-powered facial recognition thermometer from Telpo. The terminal combines three vital features — temperature measurement, mask detection, and facial recognition. The other solution is a biometric temperature screening kiosk from Meridian, which prevents anyone with a fever from entering a facility.
Pandemic tech development went even further by finding a way to diagnose the coronavirus through recordings of coughs. The University of Oklahoma proved AI could distinguish a COVID-19 cough from coughs caused by other infections. Simultaneously, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used the largest-ever database of cough recordings to train an AI model capable of detecting the coronavirus in 100% of cases.
Privacy and Security: What about the Ethical Use of the Internet of Behavior?
Privacy in the digital age remains a hot topic of discussion. Most people approve of companies using personal data to improve their products and services. But this information can fall into the hands of cybercriminals, and we are now seeing a rise in online fraud, scams, intrusions, and security breaches. Video surveillance systems that recognize faces can help prevent unwanted intrusion. But what about respecting the privacy rights of individuals?
At the same time, the amount of personal data collected is growing by leaps and bounds, yet the ethical use of this information still has no clear-cut rules. In particular, no federal laws regulate the use of facial recognition technology in the United States.
Individual states like Illinois, Washington, and Texas established a legal framework and obligated companies to obtain consent when collecting personal biometric data, exclude biometric identifiers if necessary, and securely store the information. These local initiatives prove the necessity of collecting personal data transparently and demonstrate the increasing need for ethical and responsible use of IoT technologies.
By Tatsiana Tsiukhai (Copywriter at Softeq)
