Amidst the maelstrom of chatter and at times hype about Industry 4.0, Big Data and the wave of digitisation sweeping through industry, it is easy to forget or overlook that monitoring and measuring product data is almost as age-old as the etymology of some of the terms used to describe it.
Take ‘telemetry’. Derived from the Greek roots ‘tele’ (remote) and ‘metron’ (measure), telemetry is an umbrella term for a range of technologies that are essentially automated communications processes, by which measurements and other data are collected at remote or inaccessible points and then transmitted to a receiving site or equipment for monitoring and analysis.
Telemetry has been used for decades across various industries and applications, in fact some citations suggest the earliest telemetry system was installed in Chicago in 1912 to monitor electric power distribution by transmitting data via telephone lines, from a number of electric power plants to a central office.
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