What Is Telemetry?

Telemetry is used for all sorts of different and diverse applications - from monitoring water levels and temperature fluctuation to tracking and locating stolen vehicles. But basically it's automated machine-to-machine communication. Say you're running a company that stocks vending machines.

If those machines are linked in to your computer system, and they tell you automatically when they're running low on stock, that's telemetry.

What are the benefits of Telemetry?

Take the vending machine example. Before telemetry, someone would have to visit each and every machine, checking what needed re-stocking. It's a time consuming and costly business. With telemetry:

• You only need to visit a machine when it's running low
• You know exactly what to take with you
• You know instantly what's selling well and what isn't, and you can adjust your stock accordingly
• Each machine can even tell you when it's developed a fault, so you can despatch an engineer to fix it right away

How has telemetry evolved?

The main things that have changed over the last few years is the cost and the size of the devices. Telemetry when it was used on the Apollo missions was incredibly expensive. Now simple SIM card devices can cost as little as £50.

What sort of businesses could it benefit?

Frost and Sullivan estimate that 13 billion devices across Europe have the potential to communicate - from vending machines and parking meters to photocopiers and fire alarms.

Take a pizza delivery company for example. Telemetry devices are small enough to be carried these days. So now the pizza delivery person can take your payment using Chip and PIN cards - which is more convenient for the customer and safer for the driver than carrying cash around.

The company can learn something about the customer too. If you know that a regular customer hasn't ordered a pizza for the last 24 days, you can send him a text message or a flyer to offer him a discount.