The term “Internet of things” was likely coined by Kevin Ashton of Procter & Gamble, later MIT’s Auto-ID Center, in 1999, though he prefers the phrase “Internet for things”. At that point, he viewed Radio-frequency identification (RFID) as essential to the Internet of things, which would allow computers to manage all individual things.
A research article mentioning the Internet of things was submitted to the conference for Nordic Researchers in Logistics, Norway, in June 2002, which was preceded by an article published in Finnish in January 2002. The implementation described there was developed by Kary Främling and his team at Helsinki University of Technology and more closely matches the modern one, i.e. an information system infrastructure for implementing smart, connected objects. (Fig. \ref{911315})