Advantages of Smart Dust

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!

Sources:

Image source: Corpora's website. http://corpora.hu/en/exhibitions/corpora-hardware-and-software/


Smart Dust. (2005). UH ISRC Technology Briefing. http://www.uhisrc.com/FTB/Smart%20Dust/Smart%20Dust.pdf

Smart Dust & Ubiquitious Computing. (june, 2009). http://www.nanotech-now.com/smartdust.htm