smart dust

Advance in hardware technology and engineering design have led to dramatic reduction in size, power consumption and cost for digital circuiting, wireless communication and micro electro mechanics sensors (MEMS). This has enabled very compact, autonomous and mobile nodes each containing of one or more sensors. This millimeter scale nodes each called as SMARTDUST. It was discovered at Berkeley at University of California by a team led by Prof.Kristofer.S.J. Pister This device is around size of grain of sand and contains sensors, computing ability, bi-directional wireless communication and a power supply.As tiny as dust particles, smart dust motes can be spread throughout buildings or into the atmosphere to collect and monitor data. Thus smart dust as small as a grain of rice is able to sense, think, talk and listen. Smart dust devices have applications in everything from military to meteorological to medical fields.

From light to the vibrations can be recognized using small wireless micro electromechanical sensors (MEMS), which are broadly classified as Smart Dust devices. As innovative ideas in silicon and fabrication followed, the smart dust devices, which carries out the communication, computation, and sensing into an all-in-one package, has been able to reduce its size to that of a sand grain.

These motes would collect the data compute and then pass the information using the two-way band radio between motes at distances approaching 1,000 feet. Some of the uses of these smart dust devices are identifying the manufacturing defects using vibrations, tracking patient movements in hospitals etc.

Design and engineering

The devices, or motes, are intended to be the size of a grain of sand, or even a dust particle.

When clustered together, they would automatically create highly flexible, low-power networks with applications ranging from climate control systems to entertainment devices that interact with information appliances.

The smartdust concept was introduced by Kristofer S. J. Pister (University of California) in 2001, though similar ideas existed in science fiction before then. A recent review discusses various techniques to take smartdust in sensor networks beyond millimeter dimensions to the micrometre level.

Smartdust devices will be based on sub-voltage and deep-sub-voltage nanoelectronics and include the micro power sources with all solid state impulse supercapacitors (nanoionic supercapacitors).

The recent development of nanoradios may be employed in the implementation of smartdust as a usable technology.

Applications

A typical application scenario is scattering a hundred of these sensors around a building or around a hospital to monitor temperature or humidity, track patient movements, or inform of disasters, such as earthquakes. In the military, they can perform as a remote sensor chip to track enemy movements, detect poisonous gas or radioactivity. The ease and low cost of such applications have raised privacy concerns, primarily in science fiction stories, such as Prey by Michael Crichton.