What does “smart” actually mean?

There are two common meanings for the term “smart”. One means a person who dresses conspicuously fashionable and elegant and perhaps also shows a pleasant behaviour.

Associated with technology, the second meaning is probably more important: clever, shrewd. Popular is the “smart home”, where for example the technologies are networked in a household via the IoT to make the home smarter. Like a device switches on the light or the music on demand, and the heating starts an hour before you reach home to warm up the flat pleasantly.

The smart plastics products from igus are less elegant than clever, contributing to a networked and streamlined plant operation by detecting wear, recommending maintenance, or causing a shutdown in case of defects. Why “plastics”? igus manufactures components for moving applications from high performance plastic. And these can be integrated in a smart production monitoring system with the appropriate sensors.