Smart dust

Smart dust designed at Michigan University monitoring levels of glaucoma from within the human eye, as the computer measures just over 1 mm³ and generate enough power from tiny solar cell it can report back wirelessly for years. A number of high-tech companies including Google IBM and Hewlett-Packard have now begun planning to pepper the globe with trillions strong networks of such ultra miniaturised computers, installing them underground, in household appliances, inside clothes and even inside food packaging.

Called Smart dust they contract will monitor almost any physical object making it possible to mislay an object or to buy food that is past its sell by date. Supporters of smart dust make the claim that it will solve traffic jams, savings lives in hospitals and revolutionising mining. Hewlett-Packard is currently in the process of building miniature sensors that it claims will feel taste and smell see and hear everything that is going on in the world and then analyse the data. It says it has its first million also senses already deployed underground helping the giant Shell search for oil and gas in America without drilling expensive wells. Each computer or in this case seismic sensor works amongst communicating wirelessly with other smart dust computers to build up a picture of potential oilfields. They can also be used to help predict earthquakes.

A similar system could be put on bridges or dams so that instead of manually checking the stability every year or so it could be done every hour or even every minute Hewlett-Packard envisages a worldwide network trillions of smart dust computers tracking everything from severe weather to even the progress of fluid dynamics heating systems lights TVs in the home would monitor occupants as they came and went on the run reading their needs, cars can start automatically or book themselves for an oil change.

However there is one dark cloud on the horizon heart well of Hewlett-Packard is quoted as saying if we don't get the size and cost down, to where the sensors (he means smart dust computers) to virtually nil our dream to deploy them on a global scale can't happen and IBM how smart dust is pure goodness adding we can predict traffic jams 24 hours before they happen and by analysing data from neonatal emergency units doctors can treat infections in premature babies 24 hours earlier than before.

IBM estimates that the number of objects connected to the Internet has risen by a factor of over 2000 in the past five years. People are already very much outnumbered by things connected to the Internet. But the arrival of smart dust a deluge of data that could bring down even the fastest Internet connections its complexities make it likely to remain the preserve of multinational technical giants, or companies with the buying power of shell. Handling these vast amounts of data that smart dust will generate is a specialisation in the company they have mastered systems and networks, unlike Apple computers which started in a garage, this is not only be the case this time.