Andy Stanford-Clark knows his bathroom window is open, even though he is 20 miles away on the other side of the Solent. His smartphone told him.

He can also switch on his house lights, the garden fountain, the towel rail heater or the Christmas reindeer, all from the comfort of his office at IBM’s Hursley Park software research and development centre (R&D) near Winchester.

And that’s not to mention tracking the animals in his wife’s llama trekking business at their home on the Isle of Wight.

As an IBM master inventor, Stanford-Clark has plenty of licence to play with technology – but his work always has a real-life business aim in mind.

‘IBM separates the “R” from the “D” in R&D. Research people look five or 10 years out, the blue-sky stuff unencumbered by the harsh reality of today,’ he said.

‘But in the development labs we have an applied research role, which is about taking what we have today and seeing where it will go next. It is about the evolution of the current technology rather than the revolution to the next big thing.’

Stanford-Clark has something of a pedigree in turning research into products. He was part of a team that pioneered techniques such as internet load balancing as part a project that led to the web sites for Wimbledon and the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. And for an initiative to develop an internal directory for IBM, he helped create a personalised news selection function that was a forerunner of the widely-used RSS web syndication tool.

Now his role involves looking at pervasive messaging – the concept that all objects could be internet-connected and able to communicate with each other.

‘I have always argued that the real opportunity is not handheld devices but unattended devices,’ he said.

‘There are only six billion people in the world – that means only 12 billion handheld devices at most. But everything in the world could be connected.’

Stanford-Clark’s house is wired up with networked sensors that communicate via GPRS to a prototype ‘dashboard’ monitoring system on his mobile phone. It is a trivial but easy-to-explain example of how such tiny sensors can change the way things interact with the internet – as opposed to people using the web.

The technology is already in use. Norwich Union offers a Pay as You Drive policy, that charges drivers based on where and when they drive, using in-vehicle satellite tracking. Stanford-Clark is developing a similar system to track his llamas.

And a pilot project with Southampton University called FloodNet is using sensors to remotely monitor river levels in the River Crouch in Essex.

The potential applications for business lie in developing sensor networks that take part in a process, rather than simply notifying people that a particular event has taken place.

‘You have the idea of a workflow, with a step-by-step sequence of operations that can involve a person even if they are not available, for example to approve a loan,’ said Stanford-Clark.

An emerging standard for low-power, short-range wireless networks, called Zigbee, promises to help the creation of inexpensive, self-organising mesh networks. Sensors automatically seek out their nearest neighbour to create connections that link back to central systems.

Stanford-Clark also talks about the emergence of blogjects – effectively a blog generated automatically by sensors.

‘This is a device or an object that will create its own blog about its life,’ he said.

For example, a sensor-tagged cow could ‘write’ a blog detailing its movements around a field, when it went for milking, how much milk was produced, where and what it ate and so on, based on the interaction of sensors and readers. The same could apply to inanimate objects such as a transport container.

‘It is about fitting this infrastructure into the world in which we live more effectively,’ said Stanford-Clark.

One day, you could even be reading a blog by his llamas.