Sound monitoring: Overlooked capability offers significant utility

Despite the IoT market’s intense focus on video capabilities, we think sound monitoring will garner notable traction driven in part by factors common to all areas of IoT, including declining hardware component and connectivity costs, more flexible and customer-friendly business models and improving technology.

But sound monitoring solutions also have some unique attributes that make them especially compelling in many situations. These attributes can include greater spatial coverage with fewer sensors relative to other sensor technologies, such as video, which depends on line-of-sight, and a perception that sound monitoring can be less intrusive than video.

We highlight some markets where we think sound monitoring solutions, either standalone or in combination with other sensor technologies, will see strong growth. These include security and surveillance, smart city applications, correctional facilities, smart home and building applications. We also profile players in each of these areas.

Video is arguably the hottest capability in the Internet of Things (IoT). Video-based IoT systems such as interactive home security and vehicle telematics are currently seeing the strongest demand, and companies in various verticals are rushing to add video to their portfolios to meet customer expectations. We think this strong interest is a positive as it has raised the profile of IoT and driven capital investment. However, we think it has created an environment where non-video technology with significant utility may be overlooked – at least for a time – presenting attractive opportunities for investors and even solutions providers. We think sound monitoring is one of these technologies. Like video, sound monitoring is a decades-old technology that has advanced dramatically over the past several years by incorporating more sophisticated software and wireless technologies.