Indonesia’s Ministry of Industry continues to push for the development of the Internet of Things (IoT) in order to strengthen the structure of the country’s digital technology for the implementation of Industrial 4.0.
As reported, the opportunity for Indonesia to become an IoT ecosystem is huge. This potential can be seen particularly because of the number of internet users in the country, which accounts to more than 140 million people.
Industry 4.0
The application of Industry 4.0 equates to automating and digitising the production process; and marked with an increase in connectivity, interaction and boundaries between humans, machines and other converging resources through ICT.
Digitalisation in the industrial sector will bring changes to the manufacturing system, influenced by the use of a new wave of technology.
The Minister of Industry have previously highlighted the significance of Industry 4.0 as it can bring benefits to companies that implement it, particularly through increasing their productivity and efficiency of up to 40%.
IoT Hackathon
In order to encourage the development of human resources (HR) that are capable of being competent in the digital era, the Ministry of Industry continues to provide its support to various activities aimed at improving the skills and knowledge of the people.
One such activity is an IoT solution development competition that is initiated by a global service and technology provider from Germany, which is set to take place in October.
Hopefully, the competition will produce new ideas that can be realised into product prototypes that are ready to be marketed.
The Hackathon will encourage the development of new products that have greater local content.
The event aims to foster creativity and a spirit of innovation among the digital natives or technology users in Indonesia.
The format of the competition will challenge its participants to compete with each other by organising and developing ideas to their business models. After 60 hours, the contestants will present before a jury.
Among the issues they will address are those related to smart manufacturing, smart mobility, smart cities, smart agriculture and IoT solutions that will improve on environment quality.
Creating opportunities
In other news, the Minister for Research, Technology and Higher Education Mohamad Nasir has recently launched a software that aims to assist people with visual impairment so that they can take their computer-based university entrance test in 2019.
According to the Minister, the screen reader method, which was developed by the government-run Higher Education Institution Entrance Test Agency (LTMPT), provides access to visually disabled people so that they can see text on the computer screen.
This initiative caters to the people who have disability and is being done so that all Indonesian people have equal chances of getting into the different universities.
People suffering from vision impairment will use test material that had been transformed into audio form, which may be considered more effective than the Braille method.
The computer will be reading the material for the test takers, reducing the number of problems by 20%.
A total of 70 students with vision impairment will sit through the university entrance tests, with most set to take theirs at the Yogyakarta State University.
Seven of them are looking into admissions in natural science and technology study programs.
