* Dust, Inc., touts benefits of tiny wireless sensors
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which supported the development of the Internet in the 1960s, has been providing research funds for almost 20 years devoted to the development of microelectromechanical systems. Of special interest in this area for security specialists is the work of Kristofer S. J. Pister, professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of California at Berkeley and also CEO of Dust, Inc.
As the name implies, Pister’s company specializes in the development and practical applications of “smart dust,” which are tiny wireless sensors (“motes,” ideally less than 1 cubic millimeter) that can communicate with each other and with computers to provide dynamic environmental and positional information.
Pister and his colleagues have been working on smart dust since the early 1990s and are coming close to achieving the cubic-millimeter goal. Currently, the company describes three major areas of application: building automation, industrial monitoring and security systems.
According to the company’s Web site, using cheap, independently powered sensors that can be placed anywhere in a building can help improve energy management, heating/ventilation/air-conditioning, security systems, environmental monitoring, lighting controls and fire systems.
In the industrial monitoring area, the devices can improve predictive maintenance, equipment utilization, process monitoring and remote asset monitoring.
For readers of this column, perhaps the most interesting application is in security, where the suggestions include commercial security systems, perimeter security, civil infrastructure monitoring, intruder detection, personnel protection, remote site surveillance and unattended ground sensors. In particular, the motes are much less expensive to buy and quicker to install than a wired system and can easily be redeployed as conditions change. For perimeter security, similar considerations make it much cheaper to install wireless motes on, say, oil pipelines, pumping stations and other unattended system components.
I can imagine motes being useful as physical intrusion sensors for lights-out equipment rooms in remote areas of large office complexes or factories; as environmental sensors placed inside equipment that has proven to have unreliable temperature sensors in past breakdowns; as supplementary noise sensors to detect the first evidence of impending hardware failures in mechanical devices such as disk drives, optical recording systems and media silos.
The motes could even be used as adjuncts to system security for tracking authorized personnel throughout a facility. This application also raises the obvious possibility that the tiny transmitters could be attached, à la James Bond, to the clothing or briefcases of unsuspecting surveillance victims – but such applications are possible even now using more expensive devices.
As Pister writes:
“Yes, personal privacy is getting harder and harder to come by. Yes, you can hype Smart Dust as being great for big brother… Yawn. Every technology has a dark side – deal with it. [This was my original comment on ‘dark side’ issues, but it made a lot of people think that we weren’t thinking about these issues at all. Not true.] As an engineer, or a scientist, or a hair stylist, everyone needs to evaluate what they do in terms of its positive and negative effect. If I thought that the negatives of working on this project were larger than or even comparable to the positives, I wouldn’t be working on it. As it turns out, I think that the potential benefits of this technology far far outweigh the risks to personal privacy.”
Very interesting stuff. Pister’s Web site has many links for further exploration, including descriptions of robotic insects. Golly, maybe my Ph.D. in invertebrate zoology is eventually going to be useful in computer science after all:
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