Smart dust for making smarter decisions
Imagine if you didn’t have a nervous system. Your body would have no way of regulating any of its other systems. It wouldn’t know if it was too hot or too cold. It couldn’t register dangers and harmful conditions. Every aspect of the environment would be shut off to it. In short, without a nervous system, you wouldn’t survive very long.
The fact is, in order to know how to respond to conditions you need to know what those conditions are. This is some of the thinking behind “smart dust” – very small, very cheap networked sensors for measuring all kinds of different aspects of our environment. It’s also the idea behind HP’s “Central Nervous System for the Earth” project or CeNSE. By developing sensors that can detect motion, vibration, light, temperature, air pressure, air flow and humidity, HP hopes to see them deployed throughout the environment. These will be able to keep watch over the structural integrity of buildings, bridges and other infrastructure. Chemical sensors will be able to detect dangerous conditions in our air, food and water. They’ll eventually be capable of alerting us in the event of a terrorist attack using biological agents. In short, they’ll be our eyes, ears, noses and much more. They’ll become a new kind of nervous system.
