Smart Dust: An overview
Smart Dust: The Sensors That Track Every Thing, Everywhere
The idea of the Internet of Things is so passé. The general concept of the Internet of Things is that we can put a sensor on anything and have it send data back to a database through the Internet. In this way we can monitor everything, everywhere and build smarter systems that are more interactive than ever before.
Putting sensors on stuff? Boring. What if the sensors were in the air, everywhere? They could monitor everything—temperature, humidity, chemical signatures, movement, brainwaves—everything.
The technology is called Smart Dust and it’s not quite as crazy (or as new) as you might think.
Smart Dust as a concept originated out of a research project by the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Research And Development Corporation (RAND) in the early 1990s. We use the military anecdote above because it was these military research groups that first conceptualized Smart Dust but the practical application of the technology can be applied to almost any industry. Dust in the fields monitoring the crops. Dust in the factories monitoring the output of machines. Dust in your body monitoring your entire state of well being. Dust in the forests tracking animal migration patterns, wind and humidity.
The entire world could be quantified with this type of ubiquitous sensor technology. But how does it really work?
Definition
Smart Dust devices are small wireless microelectromechanical sensors (MEMS) that can detect everything from light to vibrations. It is a tiny dust size device with extraordinary capabilities. It encompasses nano-structured silicon sensor which can spontaneously assemble, orient sense and report on their local environment. This new technology combines sensing, computing, wireless communication capabilities and autonomous power supply within the volume of only a few millimeters. It is very hard to detect the presence of the Smart Dust and it is even harder to get rid of them once deployed. Smart Dust are useful in monitoring real world phenomenon without disturbing the original process.
Application
A few years ago a team of researchers from Brown University made headlines after they successfully demonstrated how a paralyzed woman who had lost the use of her arms and legs could control a robotic arm using her brainwaves. In a video, Cathy Hutchinson imagines drinking a cup of coffee, and the robotic arm brings the cup to her lips.
The scene is amazing, but also a little disturbing. Hutchinson is connected to the robotic arm through a rod-like “pedestal” driven into her skull. At one end of the pedestal, a bundle of gold wires is attached to a tiny array of microelectrodes that is implanted in the primary motor cortex of Hutchison’s brain. This sensor, which is about the size of a baby aspirin, records her neural activity. At the other end of the pedestal is an external cable that transmits neural data to a nearby computer, which translates the signals into code that guides the robotic arm.
References
https://catchupdates.com/smart-dust/