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I just saw a spot on "specknets" on Beyond Tomorrow on the Science Channel. Basically a company has developed a computer with a tiny processor, a sensor, and wireless capability all in a 5x5x5 milimeter package. Of course, it isn't very powerful as computers go, but the idea is to manufacture them cheaply and deploy them en masse for specific functions. One example would be to monitor airplane wings for structural failure. Another idea would be to sew them into clothing so they could continuously monitor health stats and report back to a physician when things pass beyond a given threshold.
I was trying to come up with some other ideas, but I'm drawing a bit of a blank. So, assuming a network of tiny computers equipped with sensors and wireless, what applications might the Hatrack community come up with?
Posts: 6394 | Registered: Dec 1999
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Tracking school age kids, either for law enforcement (which could extend to everyone...), or as a service to babysitters/parents wanting to know if the kids were walking home... Or stopping by the neighborhood convenience store for some unauthorized candy purchases.
Fodder for bad horror movies?
Distribution in building materials for structural integrity and temperature variance. A related scientific purpose would be to place them in roofing/telephone poles and have them take basic weather measurements, increasing weather modeling granularity.
Assist in consumer-level adaptive lens optics in telescopes. No more need to worry about an image going out of focus!
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I could see these being useful for monitoring volcanoes that are at risk of erupting. They could also be embedded in food packaging to monitor freshness. They'd have utility on the hull of the space shuttle, but of course that's just an extension of the airplane example you listed.
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If they got small enough they could be useful for monitoring moisture and nutrient levels in soil. They'd be good for detecting crop disease as well, I'd imagine.
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Have them embedded all around the perimeter of cars, buildings, bridges, and garages for proximity alerts.
Posts: 5462 | Registered: Apr 2005
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There's a researcher at UofU using similar sensors to monitor snow pack melt in order to predict avalanches.
Cities could deploy them in water mains to find and characterize breaks.
If the sensors can detect biological agents they could be used for detecting air supply contamination (by being dispersed in a building's air ducts). Or water contamination, similarly.
Posts: 2926 | Registered: Sep 2005
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I thought of that, too. If they get cheap enough they could also replace carbon monoxide and smoke detectors in home applications. They could be dispersed throughout a building to provide really good temp, humidity, smoke, and CO data.
Posts: 5462 | Registered: Apr 2005
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They probably have pretty obvious (and scary) potential in the espionage arena, especially if they become very common for more mundane or legitimate uses. I imagine they would make pretty good bugging devices, and if they were deployed among many other legitimate specknets, the bugs would probably be very hard to find.
When I worked at NSA we couldn't bring in (or take out) anything that had been deemed a security threat. Even those cheap digital watches with calculators on them were banned. Cell phones were banned. I imagine it's only gotten worse now that we have several-gigabyte USB drives you can carry on your keyring. Now enter a world where any innocuous device even your clothing could be replete with tiny electronic bugs and I wouldn't be surprised if some of the highest security institutions started requiring whole-body degaussing or strip searches before reporting to work.
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