Reading real-world data from a smart contract is a well-known problem: the consequences of introducing non-blockchain (i.e. "non-trusted") data into the blockchain for dApps to "react" to real-world events are severe, potentially resulting in the cancelation of most of the benefits that blockchain can provide, especially "immutability" of data.
This is a fascinating field of research, known as the "Blockchain Oracle problem": the problem of designing an "oracle" that acts as a bridge between the real-world and the blockchain, taking care of "digesting" the real-world data, make sure that it is trusted, verifiable, and tamper-proof, then make it available to dApps: Chainlink approach is one way to tackle this problem, but one more interesting approach is with "secure hardware".
One such type of device is going to be released soon by IoTeX (an IoT-Blockchain project). IoTeX is also launching this interesting "Idea-thon" where you can think of possible use cases for these IoT secure devices, that are well-suited to send data to be used by blockchain applications allowing them to "close the trust gaps in the real world".
I think this is an interesting competition, the prizes are not high but the initiative is really interesting:
https://twitter.com/iotex_io/status/1346366029782368257?s=20
