When was the first time you heard of intelligent houses in the technology news section of your favorite news program - homes that are wired with sensors and links to a central computer that can heat it, cool it, manag the lights exactly as you wish, alert you to repairs that need to be done, toilets that give you automatic urine tests and so on? This kind of house is a reality today, if you have that kind of money. And it took only about 20 years. That's the kind of time it takes in the computer business, for an idea to make it from the drawing board. The designers need time to perfect their design, convince the powers that be that the technology is actually sound, that there is a market for it, to work out the kinks in actually making it possible - it does take time, you understand.
This is another such time; we are hearing about turning the whole of the planet into a kind of wired organism; it is Hewlett-Packard's project, and in their technology news release, they call it the Central Nervous System for the Earth. So what is it exactly? They call it Smart Dust; they plan to make tiny, dust particle-sized sensors, billions of them. Each will be capable of sensing a wealth of things, temperature, vibrations, poisonous chemicals, biological changes, and so on. Actually, these will be tiny computers that will be able to process whatever inputs they receive.
You have heard in the technology news about how Hewlett-Packard is a nanotechnology giant; this is where all of that comes in. The company wishes to embed these all over - in bridges, in buildings, and cars. They will generate and transmit vast seas of data that can tell us when buildings seem to be in need of repair, when something is wrong with a bridge. Hewlett-Packard probably thinks that this will throw up the need for new computers all over the place to process this data, and that will be good business for their existing business model selling computers. While this may well be, some say that this may not exactly need an all-new set of high-tech microscopic sensors. We may already have widely distributed sensors all over the earth that may be better-suited for the job: you know what they are, cell phones and laptops.
With a little modification, modern cell phones with GPS, Internet connectivity and all kinds of other features, can probably collect data far better than any dust-mite sized sensor. And one of the best ways to use these microscopic sensors, so says UCLA's technology newsletter, is in personal health. They call this participatory sensing. Sensors are able to track your eating habits, your blood glucose and pressure, when you sleep, and so on. A Twitter application for your mobile lets you report all this data online, and it will give you advice right there, once it learns enough about you. Your mobile as a part of you; it doesn't even seem to be a device you carry anymore. For an iPhone or Blackberry, this should be the must-have feature soon.