What is Ambient IoT?

Plus, this week's top stories from IoT For All

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IoT For All
February 20, 2025

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Hello readers!

Welcome to this week’s IoT For All newsletter where we’ll be talking about the new Ambient IoT Alliance, IoT and AI in aviation safety, edge AI in 2025, and more.

What is Ambient IoT?

One of the challenges of maintaining an IoT setup is making sure everything has power. Stationary sensors have the luxury of being hardwired, but mobile sensors usually require batteries or a way to charge. The Ambient IoT Alliance, announced this week and including heavy hitters like Intel and Qualcomm, aims to expand the exception to that rule.

Originally coined by the The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), the term “Ambient IoT” has been floating around since about 2023, used to describe mobile sensors that don’t require batteries to function. As the newly formed Ambient IoT Alliance puts it:

Ambient Internet of Things (IoT) refers to a class of IoT devices primarily powered by harvesting ambient energy from radio waves, light, motion, heat, or any other viable ambient energy source. Ambient IoT is an evolution of legacy IoT and RFID technologies that promises lower costs and high scalability through support by global telecommunications standards, including Bluetooth, 5G Advanced, and 802.11bp.

The concept itself is not especially new. Passive RFID tags, which harvest the power of the very electromagnetic waves used to search for them, date back to the 1970s. The tech has advanced a bit since then, with offerings like Wiliot’s “IoT Pixels,” that use the same basic principle to communicate via Bluetooth. Not to mention the potential for devices that power themselves with waste energy like ambient light, heat, or vibration.

The approach has a number of considerable upsides. The relative lack of required maintenance is obvious. The sustainability benefits are also clear. And with no ongoing energy costs, sufficiently inexpensive ambient sensors would be a no-brainer for large-scale deployments, making them excellent for collecting vast quantities of data required for training AI solutions.

There is still plenty to do before the tech can comfortably reach that scale, however. Standards for ambient IoT sensors are still under development by organizations such as the IEEE (Wi-Fi), Bluetooth SIG, and 3GPP (5G Advanced). The Ambient IoT Alliance aims to support, not supplant, these efforts while raising awareness of the concept.

How hard could it be? It’s not like there’s anything else people mean when they say “AIoT”…

📖 Top Articles

Today, the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) is setting new standards for flight safety and communication systems. These innovations are not just improving efficiency—they are actively saving lives. Unfortunately, 2025 has already seen tragic aviation disasters, including the recent crash in Washington, reminding us that flight safety remains a critical issue. While the aviation industry continues to push the boundaries of technology, incidents like these demonstrate that communication failures and operational risks still pose significant threats.

Rural areas are disadvantaged when emergencies happen, and when catastrophes are severe, the suffering is prolonged. Rural communities are often spread out over large areas, residents usually have to travel long distances to access health care, and even the hospitals in these regions may have inadequate resources. Fortunately, the Internet of Things (IoT) may hold the solution to addressing these inefficiencies.

The fusion of Edge Computing and Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been a game-changer in the tech landscape. With analysts predicting that 50 percent of enterprises will adopt edge computing by 2029, up from 20 percent in 2024, the Edge momentum is undeniable. However, the journey towards widespread Edge AI adoption remains filled with both, opportunities and challenges.

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🎙️ The IoT For All Podcast

No new podcast this week, but check out our most recent episode with Fabrizio Del Maffeo, co-founder and CEO of Axelera AI, discussing edge AI. The conversation covers the importance and benefits of edge AI, such as reduced latency, real-time decision-making, and privacy, optimizing algorithms and hardware for edge devices, the potential of AI in various industries, cloud computing, retrofitting existing solutions, and the impact of generative AI.