A multi-criteria approach toward discovering killer IoT application in Korea

The vision of IoT has become an important agenda in the ICT industry; however, a tangible IoT market has yet to evolve, and full-fledged IoT applications have yet to emerge. In order to encourage IoT market participation, reliable evidence guaranteeing market success needs to be presented to investors and enterprises. Particularly, the most promising domain in IoT needs to be discovered as a killer application to primarily invest in and develop, so that it can pioneer the IoT market. This study proposes an AHP model for assessing the viability of IoT applications, which consists of 11 technology, market, and regulation factors. The model was applied to assess and compare the prospect of three IoT applications - i.e. IoT healthcare, IoT logistics, and IoT energy management, inviting the perception of 31 ICT experts. The results showed that IoT logistics is the most promising IoT application, due to its strong market potential. IoT healthcare is perceived to have strength in wide consumer market demand, but reliability issues and regulation issues were posed. Meanwhile, IoT energy management showed strengths only in governmental support. The results also imply that it would be wiser for the government to focus on eliminating regulatory bottlenecks.