Now that we have shed light on the theoretical concept of an IoT architecture, let’s see what devising one may look like in practice. To illustrate the peculiarities of building IoT solutions, we will turn to a project from
ITRex's portfolio.
One of our clients turned to us with the idea of building a
smart fitness mirror to help people train at home as effectively as they do at a gym. The mirror would replace a fitness coach, “watching” a person working out to provide feedback on training sessions and prepare tailored training plans for future workouts. ITRex’s engineers took on the challenge and devised an architecture for the solution, embracing everything from hardware to firmware to end-user mobile apps.
The architecture we ended up designing focused heavily on edge computing. The majority of data from the mirror’s sensors and cameras is processed on the device itself, and only a part of statistical information is passed over to the cloud.
Kirill Stashevski, CTO at ITRex, explains the choice to prioritize edge computing over traditional, cloud-based models: “We tested out both approaches — and edge computing won in terms of providing higher performance. So, the data from the mirror’s cameras and adhesive motion sensors that accompany the mirror and go on weights is analyzed close to where it is generated. This saves lots of time and helps cut down operational expenses. And that’s the thing with designing successful IoT architectures — you have to make choices and test out assumptions, choosing what works best for you.”
The high-level architecture for the solution, thus, looks as follows: