RFID tags, which have been used to identify everything from cattle to tombstones, will not be the only type of sensor crowding the planet. Anything and anyone—machines, devices, everyday things and particularly humans—can become a sensor, gathering and transmitting information about the real world.
The concept of the “internet of things” dates back to the late 1980s, when researchers at Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) in Silicon Valley imagined a future in which the virtual and the real world would be connected. In the following years much of the academic work concentrated on bringing this about with RFID tags, which are reliable, inexpensive and do not require a power supply. When exposed to a radio signal, they use its energy to send back the information they contain, mostly a long number identifying an object.
Now it is “active” tags (which have their own power source) and, even more, wireless sensors that are attracting most of the interest. As with all things electronic, these are becoming ever smaller and more versatile.
Engineers working on sensors think this will eventually lead to “smart dust”—sensors as small as dust particles that can be dispersed on a battlefield, say, to spy on the enemy’s movements. Such devices are still far off, but at Hewlett-Packard (HP) in Silicon Valley a taste—or more precisely, a feel—of things to come is on offer even now. To demonstrate the firm’s new accelerometer, a device the size of a cigarette box that measures the acceleration of an object, Peter Hartwell, a researcher, puts it on his chest, and a graph of his heartbeat appears on a screen beside him. “This sensor”, he proudly explains, “is one thousand times more sensitive than those in your smartphone.”
Read more at The Economist.
