This Blog is ment to expose the audience to Information Systems and Technologies that are being developed and researched, and explore what would the adoption of this technologies mean for the future of business and related areas.
When we encounter the development of technologies like Smart Dust there's an obvious fear that comes to mind that many people already experience with the growth of the Internet, digital media, and the increase of surveillance devices around the city. This the "Big Brother fear" or the fear of being watched and having no privacy. this is a real concern that needs to be addressed if developers of this technologies them to be accepted and embraced by the public.
Another concern is that the environment will become polluted with motes as motes that are used to measure atmospheric and climate conditions start to land an accumulate on land and water. Pister, who introduced the concept of Smart Dust, disagrees with this last argument he argues that since mots do not need to be in really close distances to do communicate with each other and since they come at a cost only the necessary amount will be deployed.
When we think of all the possible areas that Smart Dust technologies could benefit the possibilities seem endless. The main areas were applications for this technologies are being researched and developed seem to be Military, Weather Forecast, Environmental Sciences, daily appliances and utilites, Entertainment, Medicine, and things like traffic flow information.
Lets star with Military uses, one may wonder how can computer the size of a grain of sand be of any use to the military, well if you "sprinkle" a combat zone with thousands of this devices and you think of them as nerve endings that report back to the "brain" or command centre it would feel like having the enemy waking on the "palm of your hand" and it's hard to hide on a palm. Smart Dust could sense temperature, movement, and by forming a self organising network where each mote communicates with the ones closest to it highly accurate information could be acquired about enemy positions and movements.
This concept of movement tracking could be directly applied to commercial uses like monitoring the flow of traffic in the cities and automatically advise cars which route to take.
The potential uses on the Medical field are not clear but the nature of the devices would suggest its uses to be more narrowed to diagnostic medicine.
On the field of biology and areas where enviroment monitoring is needed like measuring temperatures in forest areas to prevent fires or to be able to respond to them when they are still small, as well as using Smart Dust as a kind of RFID device to track different species of animals and study them or determine their needs could probe quite useful.
Potential entertainment uses could range from the use of Smart Clay to mold it and create virtual representations of the object being molded as you go, to attaching Smart Dust like devices to hands and fingers to literally play air instruments!
As this concept concept continues to evolve the uses of this technology are inevitably going to cross the borders of many industries and areas of our lives. some of the obvious uses is weather forecast which now uses single static or free nodes many which are launched every day to the atmosphere attached to balloons from where they make measurements that they later transmit. but as many describe it Smart Dust will replace many of this technologies by "virtually connecting us with the environment". Instead of having a few nodes making measurements, we will have literally thousands of motes being released into the atmosphere and communicating back the intrinsic patterns of cloud movements with amazing detail.
The idea of Smart Dust although originally depicted in science fiction movies, was officially introduced in 1998 by dr. Kris Pister of the UC berkeley (Hsu, Kahm, and Pister 1998; Eisenberg 1999). Pister wanted to build an all in one sensor, communication, and micro computer device. This devices are called "Motes", the existing motes are of the size of a stack of coins the smallest and have one or more sensing capabilities (light, temperature, etc.) a power supply and most importantly a communication system. But why is it called dust? well that's were it gets interesting... although it hasn't been achieved yet the tendency is to reduce the dimensions of this motes to the size of a grain of sand or dust. previously I mentioned the importance of motes having an integrated communication system usually wireless, why is this so important? well I'm glad you asked.... although a mote of the size of a grain of sand would be pretty impressive in itself it would render quite useless as a stand alone piece of equipment, the magic begins when you have thousands of this motes lying or even flying around forming a self organising network that collects and transmits al kinds of information through it.
