Showing posts with label Smart Dust. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Smart Dust. Show all posts
Saturday, June 1, 2024
Monday, November 27, 2023
Wireless Mind Control: Neural “Smart” Dust Will Now Connect Human Brain To a Computer
See a past article on this topic here.
By Nicholas West
Neural Dust – “Smart Dust” – has entered the mainstream via the Independent’s article: “Tiny implant could connect humans and machines like never before.” This new technology can wirelessly link a human brain to a computer via the implantation of a device the size of a grain of sand. This invention is clearly nothing new; but when the mainstream media begins highlighting something that is literally wireless mind control, it’s worth taking note. It is also worth noting that, as more people learn about science fiction becoming science reality, they are becoming increasingly hesitant about the lack of ethical boundaries for what is emerging.
Some people might have heard about Smart Dust; nanoparticles that can be employed as sensor networks for a range of security and environmental applications. Now, however, literal Smart Dust for the brain is being proposed as the next step toward establishing a brain-computer interface.
The system is officially called “neural dust” and works to “monitor the brain from the inside.” Inventors are attempting to overcome the hurdle of how to best implant sensors that can remain over the course of one’s life. Researchers at Berkeley Engineering believe they have found a novel way to achieve this:
This paper explores the fundamental system design trade-offs and ultimate size, power, and bandwidth scaling limits of neural recording systems.A network of tiny implantable sensors could function like an MRI inside the brain, recording data on nearby neurons and transmitting it back out. The smart dust particles would all contain an extremely small CMOS sensor capable of measuring electrical activity in nearby neurons. The researchers envision a piezoelectric material backing the CMOS capable of generating electrical signals from ultrasound waves. The process would also work in reverse, allowing the dust to beam data back via high-frequency sound waves. The neural dust would also be coated with polymer. (Source)
The investment in neuroscience has received a $100 million dollar commitment via Obama’s BRAIN project, while Europe has committed $1.3 billion to build a supercomputer replica of the brain in a similarly comprehensive and detailed fashion as the Human Genome Project mapped DNA.
Concurrently, there is massive long-term investment in nanotech applications via the 60-page National Nanotechnology Initiative 2011 Strategic Plan (now updated to 88 pages in 2014 – Ed.) This document lays out a projected future “to understand and control matter” for the management of every facet of human life within the surveillance matrix of environment, health and safety. Twenty-five U.S. Federal agencies are participating.
The concept of Smart Dust has been applied and/or proposed for use in the following ways, just to name a few:
- Nano sensors for use in agriculture that measure crops and environmental conditions.
- Bomb-sniffing plants using rewired DNA to detect explosives and biological agents.
- “Smart Dust” motes that wirelessly transmit data on temperature, light, and movement (this can also be used in currency to track cash).
However, this is the first time that there is a working plan to apply Smart Dust to the human brain. Researchers claim it will be some time before (if ever) this is workable. One aspect that is interesting to note, is that once these particles are sent into the brain, it will be ultrasound that activates the system for full monitoring. This is an area of research that also has been looked at by DARPA as one of the future methods of mind control.
Their idea is to sprinkle electronic sensors the size of dust particles into the cortex and to interrogate them remotely using ultrasound. The ultrasound also powers this so-called neural dust.Each particle of neural dust consists of standard CMOS circuits and sensors that measure the electrical activity in neurons nearby…The neural dust is interrogated by another component placed beneath the scale but powered from outside the body. This generates the ultrasound that powers the neural dust and sensors that listen out for their response, rather like an RFID system.The system is also tetherless–the data is collected and stored outside the body for later analysis. (source, MIT)
Read “tetherless” as “wireless” — or remote controlled analysis of the human brain, thus opening the door (theoretically) for remote mind control. As I’ve highlighted before, this is a two-way street — some people might feel content, for example, with sending their brain’s information out to a doctor for evaluation, but this sensor network could also transmit data back, as is admitted here:
That’s why Seo and co have chosen ultrasound to send and receive data. They calculate that the power required to use electromagnetic waves on the scale would generate a damaging amount of heat because of the amount of energy the body absorbs and the troubling signal-to-noise ratios at this scale.By contrast, ultrasound is a much more efficient and should allow the transmission of at least 10 million times more power than electromagnetic waves at the same scale. (emphasis added).
In case anyone believes that this has little chance of success, MIT highlights that one of the authors of the research has already achieved this with a remote controlled beetle.
The human brain is clearly of vast, perhaps infinite, complexity — and this is without even introducing concepts such as “the mind” or “the soul.” Nevertheless, it is clear that the reductionists are doing their very best to “Solve the Brain” — measuring it, mapping it, and making sense of it.(source)
Are we to believe that “controlling it” has been left off the list for mere ethical reasons? Not likely.
Reading Minds and Influencing Human Behavior With Neural Dust
See similar articles to this one here, here, and here. This is technology that intelligence agencies and organized crime currently have and are using against the public. For other articles on this topic, please see here. See here for more about DARPA smart dust. See here for more about the DARPA Artificial Intelligence Control Grid. Also see here and here for biowarfare.
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Robert Sanders
UC Berkeley engineers have built the first dust-sized, wireless sensors that can be implanted in the body, bringing closer the day when a Fitbit-like device could monitor internal nerves, muscles or organs in real time.
Wireless, battery-less implantable sensors could improve brain control of prosthetics, avoiding wires that go through the skull. (UC Berkeley video by Roxanne Makasdjian and Stephen McNally)
Because these batteryless sensors could also be used to stimulate nerves and muscles, the technology also opens the door to “electroceuticals” to treat disorders such as epilepsy or to stimulate the immune system or tamp down inflammation.
The so-called neural dust, which the team implanted in the muscles and peripheral nerves of rats, is unique in that ultrasound is used both to power and read out the measurements. Ultrasound technology is already well-developed for hospital use, and ultrasound vibrations can penetrate nearly anywhere in the body, unlike radio waves, the researchers say.
“I think the long-term prospects for neural dust are not only within nerves and the brain, but much broader,“ said Michel Maharbiz, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences and one of the study’s two main authors. “Having access to in-body telemetry has never been possible because there has been no way to put something super tiny super-deep. But now I can take a speck of nothing and park it next to a nerve or organ, your GI tract or a muscle, and read out the data.“
They’re also working to expand the motes’ ability to detect non-electrical signals, such as oxygen or hormone levels.
Marharbiz hit on the idea of ultrasound, and in 2013 published a paper with Carmena, Seo and their colleagues describing how such a system might work. “Our first study demonstrated that the fundamental physics of ultrasound allowed for very, very small implants that could record and communicate neural data,” said Maharbiz. He and his students have now created that system.
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Robert Sanders
UC Berkeley engineers have built the first dust-sized, wireless sensors that can be implanted in the body, bringing closer the day when a Fitbit-like device could monitor internal nerves, muscles or organs in real time.
Wireless, battery-less implantable sensors could improve brain control of prosthetics, avoiding wires that go through the skull. (UC Berkeley video by Roxanne Makasdjian and Stephen McNally)
Because these batteryless sensors could also be used to stimulate nerves and muscles, the technology also opens the door to “electroceuticals” to treat disorders such as epilepsy or to stimulate the immune system or tamp down inflammation.
The so-called neural dust, which the team implanted in the muscles and peripheral nerves of rats, is unique in that ultrasound is used both to power and read out the measurements. Ultrasound technology is already well-developed for hospital use, and ultrasound vibrations can penetrate nearly anywhere in the body, unlike radio waves, the researchers say.
“I think the long-term prospects for neural dust are not only within nerves and the brain, but much broader,“ said Michel Maharbiz, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences and one of the study’s two main authors. “Having access to in-body telemetry has never been possible because there has been no way to put something super tiny super-deep. But now I can take a speck of nothing and park it next to a nerve or organ, your GI tract or a muscle, and read out the data.“
The sensor, 3 millimeters long and 1×1 millimeters in cross section, attached to a nerve fiber in a rat. Once implanted, the batteryless sensor is powered and the data read out by ultrasound. (Ryan Neely photo)
Maharbiz, neuroscientist Jose Carmena, a professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences and a member of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, and their colleagues will report their findings in the August 3 issue of the journal Neuron.
The sensors, which the researchers have already shrunk to a 1 millimeter cube – about the size of a large grain of sand – contain a piezoelectric crystal that converts ultrasound vibrations from outside the body into electricity to power a tiny, on-board transistor that is in contact with a nerve or muscle fiber. A voltage spike in the fiber alters the circuit and the vibration of the crystal, which changes the echo detected by the ultrasound receiver, typically the same device that generates the vibrations. The slight change, called backscatter, allows them to determine the voltage.
Motes sprinkled thoughout the body
In their experiment, the UC Berkeley team powered up the passive sensors every 100 microseconds with six 540-nanosecond ultrasound pulses, which gave them a continual, real-time readout. They coated the first-generation motes – 3 millimeters long, 1 millimeter high and 4/5 millimeter thick – with surgical-grade epoxy, but they are currently building motes from biocompatible thin films which would potentially last in the body without degradation for a decade or more.
The sensor mote contains a piezoelectric crystal (silver cube) plus a simple electronic circuit that responds to the voltage across two electrodes to alter the backscatter from ultrasound pulses produced by a transducer outside the body. The voltage across the electrodes can be determined by analyzing the ultrasound backscatter.
(Ryan Neely photo)
(Ryan Neely photo)
While the experiments so far have involved the peripheral nervous system and muscles, the neural dust motes could work equally well in the central nervous system and brain to control prosthetics, the researchers say. Today’s implantable electrodes degrade within 1 to 2 years, and all connect to wires that pass through holes in the skull. Wireless sensors – dozens to a hundred – could be sealed in, avoiding infection and unwanted movement of the electrodes.
“The original goal of the neural dust project was to imagine the next generation of brain-machine interfaces, and to make it a viable clinical technology,” said neuroscience graduate student Ryan Neely. “If a paraplegic wants to control a computer or a robotic arm, you would just implant this electrode in the brain and it would last essentially a lifetime.”
In a paper published online in 2013, the researchers estimated that they could shrink the sensors down to a cube 50 microns on a side – about 2 thousandths of an inch, or half the width of a human hair. At that size, the motes could nestle up to just a few nerve axons and continually record their electrical activity.
“The beauty is that now, the sensors are small enough to have a good application in the peripheral nervous system, for bladder control or appetite suppression, for example,“ Carmena said. “The technology is not really there yet to get to the 50-micron target size, which we would need for the brain and central nervous system. Once it’s clinically proven, however, neural dust will just replace wire electrodes. This time, once you close up the brain, you’re done.“
The team is working now to miniaturize the device further, find more biocompatible materials and improve the surface transceiver that sends and receives the ultrasounds, ideally using beam-steering technology to focus the sounds waves on individual motes. They are now building little backpacks for rats to hold the ultrasound transceiver that will record data from implanted motes.
Diagram showing the components of the sensor. The entire device is covered in a biocompatible gel.
They’re also working to expand the motes’ ability to detect non-electrical signals, such as oxygen or hormone levels.
“The vision is to implant these neural dust motes anywhere in the body, and have a patch over the implanted site send ultrasonic waves to wake up and receive necessary information from the motes for the desired therapy you want,” said Dongjin Seo, a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer sciences. “Eventually you would use multiple implants and one patch that would ping each implant individually, or all simultaneously.”
Ultrasound vs radio
Maharbiz and Carmena conceived of the idea of neural dust about five years ago, but attempts to power an implantable device and read out the data using radio waves were disappointing. Radio attenuates very quickly with distance in tissue, so communicating with devices deep in the body would be difficult without using potentially damaging high-intensity radiation.
A sensor implanted on a peripheral nerve is powered and interrogated by an ultrasound transducer. The backscatter signal carries information about the voltage across the sensor’s two electrodes. The ‘dust’ mote was pinged every 100 microseconds with six 540-nanosecond ultrasound pulses.
Marharbiz hit on the idea of ultrasound, and in 2013 published a paper with Carmena, Seo and their colleagues describing how such a system might work. “Our first study demonstrated that the fundamental physics of ultrasound allowed for very, very small implants that could record and communicate neural data,” said Maharbiz. He and his students have now created that system.
“Ultrasound is much more efficient when you are targeting devices that are on the millimeter scale or smaller and that are embedded deep in the body,” Seo said. “You can get a lot of power into it and a lot more efficient transfer of energy and communication when using ultrasound as opposed to electromagnetic waves, which has been the go-to method for wirelessly transmitting power to miniature implants”
“Now that you have a reliable, minimally invasive neural pickup in your body, the technology could become the driver for a whole gamut of applications, things that today don’t even exist,“ Carmena said.
Other co-authors of the Neuron paper are graduate student Konlin Shen, undergraduate Utkarsh Singhal and UC Berkeley professors Elad Alon and Jan Rabaey. The work was supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense.
Saturday, January 1, 2022
The Great 'Transhumanism' Reset: 'Smart Dust' Spying on Your Brain, Human Microchipping
As early as 2014, futurologist Dr. Oskar Villani said it was possible to monitor people with barely visible computer chips. These tiny chips are called “Smart Dust.” Hundreds of them can be “transferred” to a person with a simple handshake. DARPA, a military research facility of the US Department of Defense, was significantly involved in its development. They also found a way to use Smart Dust to read our brain waves and signals, potentially exposing unexpressed thoughts and moods. The merging of humans with machines is being used to advance globalists’ interests, reshape humanity, and gain complete control over every aspect of our lives.
Futurologist Oskar Villani 2014 Interview
It appears that it is possible to transfer tiny chips, which are hardly visible to the naked eye, to other people with a handshake – it is no longer even necessary to implant microchips to monitor people. On July 1, 2014, the futurologist Oskar Villani was a guest on German television program “Heute Konkret”. The nearly 5-minute interview begins with Villani shaking hands with presenter Claudia Reiterer and then telling her that he has now transferred several hundred microchips to her, which can now be used to monitor her for up to 14 days and read a wide variety of data.
These tiny chips are called “Smart Dust,” hundreds of them can be “transferred” with a simple handshake. DARPA, a military research facility of the US Department of Defense, was significantly involved in the development. Villani also reported there is a way to use Smart Dust to monitor our brains.
Watch the following Interview with Dr. Oskar Villani that has been translated by RAIR Foundation USA here:
Intelligent Dust: Developed Through Military Research
Because the so-called ” smart dust” was already developed in the 1990s by Dr. Kris Pister, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, as a simple way to use smart wireless sensors, Pister envisioned a world where ubiquitous sensors could measure almost anything. Unsurprisingly, the U.S. military provided the impetus, funding, and development.
In 1997, DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) funded Pister’s research as part of their Smart Dust project. (DARPA was also involved in the development of mRNA technology). Then, in 2001, the American military conducted a surveillance test with the devices. After successfully calculating the speed and direction of 142 military vehicles, the test was declared a great success.
Brain Monitoring
In 2013, MIT reported, “How Smart Dust Could Spy On Your Brain.” This study revealed how Smart Dust is already developed, used, and soon will be a daily part of our lives.
Once again, Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, were the first to propose what they called ‘neural dust’ – millimeter-sized sensors that could be implanted in the body and used to stimulate nerves and muscles and monitor the activity of different organs.
It consists of “many small wireless microelectromechanical systems (MEMS).” MEMS are tiny devices with cameras, sensors, and communication mechanisms to transmit the data to be stored and further processed. They are usually between 20 micrometers and one millimeter in size. They are wirelessly connected to a computer network and distributed over a specific area to perform tasks, generally using RFID technology(Radio Frequency Identification) can be recorded.
Elon Musk and Neuralink: Can We Read People’s Minds Soon
In 2016, DARPA program manager Doug Weber stated that “neural dust [note: smart dust] represents a radical departure from the traditional approach of using radio waves for wireless communication with implanted devices.” And further: “The soft parts of our body consist mostly of saltwater. Sound waves can pass through this tissue unhindered and be focused with great accuracy on nerve targets deep in our body, while radio waves cannot.” Using ultrasound to communicate with the nerve dust also allows the sensors to be made smaller. For example, they can be introduced into the body by injection with a needle.
This, therefore, is a technology that can be used in the spirit of transhumanists. Elon Musk has already founded Neuralink, a company whose goal is to connect the human brain to a computer. The company is developing an ultra-high bandwidth brain chip to connect humans, computers, and artificial intelligence, what Musk refers to as “a Fitbit in your skull with tiny wires.”
In 2020, Musk and Neuralink demonstrated their success with implanting just such a chip in pigs, with humans being their next target.
Schwab writes that the ability “for law enforcement agencies and courts to use techniques to determine the likelihood of criminal activity, assess guilt or even possibly retrieve memories directly from people’s brains will increase,” adding, “Even crossing a national border might one day involve a detailed brain scan to assess an individual’s security risk.”
Klaus goes on to state that the “Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies will not stop at becoming part of the physical world around us; they will become part of us,” adding,
Indeed, some of us already feel that our smartphones have become an extension of ourselves. Today’s external devices—from wearable computers to virtual reality headsets—will almost certainly become implantable in our bodies and brains.
Exoskeletons and prosthetics will increase our physical power, while advances in neurotechnology enhance our cognitive abilities. We will become better able to manipulate our own genes, and those of our children
For years, people have been implanted with chips linked to digital currencies and smart devices through the 5G network to process payments directly and allow them to access their homes, offices, and gyms. The chips also allow big-tech databases and government surveillance measures to track and monitor their location, activities, and behaviors.
A global system of totalitarian technocracy has arrived; of course, I’m sure it will only help us! What an exciting “brave new world” we are entering. As Klaus notes:
[It] will change not only what we do but also who we are. It will affect our identity and all the issues associated with it: our sense of privacy, our notions of ownership, our consumption patterns, the time we devote to work and leisure, and how we develop our careers, cultivate our skills, meet people, and nurture relationships.”
Wednesday, December 15, 2021
Implantable “Neural Dust” Enables Precise Wireless Recording of Nerve Activity
First in vivo tests demonstrate ultrasound can be used to wirelessly power and communicate with millimeter-scale devices surgically placed in muscles and nerves
OUTREACH@DARPA.MIL8/3/2016
Therapeutic modulation of the activity of the body’s peripheral nervous system (PNS) holds a world of potential for mitigating and treating disease and other health conditions—if researchers can figure out a feasible long-term mechanism for communicating with the nerves and pathways that make up the body’s information superhighway between the spinal cord and other organs.
What does “feasible” look like? Small is the best start—small enough to someday perhaps be injected or ingested—but also precise, wireless, stable, and comfortable for the user. Modern electrode-based recording technologies feature some, but not all of these qualities. Hardwired solutions present challenges for chronic use, while existing wireless solutions cannot be adequately scaled down to the sizes needed to record activity from small-diameter nerves and record independently from many discrete sites within a nerve bundle. DARPA’s Electrical Prescriptions (ElectRx) program is focused in part on overcoming these constraints and delivering interface technologies that are suitable for chronic use for biosensing and neuromodulation of peripheral nerve targets.
Now, as described in results published today in the journal Neuron, a DARPA-funded research team led by the University of California, Berkeley’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences has developed a safe, millimeter-scale wireless device small enough to be implanted in individual nerves, capable of detecting electrical activity of nerves and muscles deep within the body, and that uses ultrasound for power coupling and communication. They call these devices “neural dust.” The team completed the first in vivo tests of this technology in rodents.
“Neural dust represents a radical departure from the traditional approach of using radio waves for wireless communication with implanted devices,” said Doug Weber, the DARPA program manager for ElectRx. “The soft tissues of our body consist mostly of saltwater. Sound waves pass freely through these tissues and can be focused with pinpoint accuracy at nerve targets deep inside our body, while radio waves cannot. Indeed, this is why sonar is used to image objects in the ocean, while radar is used to detect objects in the air. By using ultrasound to communicate with the neural dust, the sensors can be made smaller and placed deeper inside the body, by needle injection or other non-surgical approaches.”
The prototype neural dust “motes” currently measure 0.8 millimeters x 3 millimeters x 1 millimeter as assembled with commercially available components. The researchers estimate that by using custom parts and processes, they could manufacture individual motes of 1 cubic millimeter or less in size—possibly as small as 100 microns per side. The small size means multiple sensors could be placed near each other to make more precise recordings of nerve activity from many sites within a nerve or group of nerves.
Though their miniscule size is an achievement in itself, the dust motes are as impressive for the elegant simplicity of their engineering. Each sensor consists of only three main parts: a pair of electrodes to measure nerve signals, a custom transistor to amplify the signal, and a piezoelectric crystal that serves the dual purpose of converting the mechanical power of externally generated ultrasound waves into electrical power and communicating the recorded nerve activity. The neural dust system also includes an external transceiver board that uses ultrasound to power and communicate with the motes by emitting pulses of ultrasonic energy and listening for reflected pulses. During testing, the transceiver board was positioned approximately 9 millimeters away from the implant.
The piezoelectric crystal is key to the design of neural dust. Pulses of ultrasonic energy emitted by the external board affect the crystal. While some of the pulses are reflected back to the board, others cause the crystal to vibrate. This vibration converts the mechanical power of the ultrasound wave into electrical power, which is supplied to the dust mote’s transistor. Meanwhile, any extracellular voltage change across the mote’s two recording electrodes—generated by nerve activity—modulates the transistor’s gate, which changes the current flowing between the terminals of the crystal. These changes in current alter the vibration of the crystal and the intensity of its reflected ultrasonic energy. In this way, the shape of the reflected ultrasonic pulses encodes the electrophysiological voltage signal recorded by the implanted electrodes. This signal can be reconstructed externally by electronics attached to the transceiver board to interpret nerve activity. “One of the most appealing features of the neural dust sensors is that they are completely passive. Because there are no batteries to be changed, there is no need for further surgeries after the initial implant,” Weber said.
Another benefit of the system is that ultrasound is safe in the human body; ultrasound technologies have long been used for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes. Most existing wireless PNS sensors use electromagnetic energy in the form of radio waves for coupling and communication, but these systems become inefficient for sensors smaller than 5 millimeters. To work at smaller scales, these systems must increase their energy output, and much of that energy gets absorbed by surrounding tissue. Ultrasound has the advantage of penetrating deeper into tissue at lower power levels, reducing the risk of adverse effects while yielding excellent spatial resolution.
This proof of concept was developed under the first phase of the ElectRx program. The research team will continue to work on further miniaturizing the sensors, ensuring biocompatibility, increasing the portability of the transceiver board, and achieving clarity in signals processing when multiple sensors are placed near each other.
Image Caption: Each neural dust sensor consists of only three main parts: a pair of electrodes to measure nerve signals, a custom transistor to amplify the signal, and a piezoelectric crystal that serves the dual purpose of converting the mechanical power of externally generated ultrasound waves into electrical power and communicating the recorded nerve activity.
What does “feasible” look like? Small is the best start—small enough to someday perhaps be injected or ingested—but also precise, wireless, stable, and comfortable for the user. Modern electrode-based recording technologies feature some, but not all of these qualities. Hardwired solutions present challenges for chronic use, while existing wireless solutions cannot be adequately scaled down to the sizes needed to record activity from small-diameter nerves and record independently from many discrete sites within a nerve bundle. DARPA’s Electrical Prescriptions (ElectRx) program is focused in part on overcoming these constraints and delivering interface technologies that are suitable for chronic use for biosensing and neuromodulation of peripheral nerve targets.
Now, as described in results published today in the journal Neuron, a DARPA-funded research team led by the University of California, Berkeley’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences has developed a safe, millimeter-scale wireless device small enough to be implanted in individual nerves, capable of detecting electrical activity of nerves and muscles deep within the body, and that uses ultrasound for power coupling and communication. They call these devices “neural dust.” The team completed the first in vivo tests of this technology in rodents.
“Neural dust represents a radical departure from the traditional approach of using radio waves for wireless communication with implanted devices,” said Doug Weber, the DARPA program manager for ElectRx. “The soft tissues of our body consist mostly of saltwater. Sound waves pass freely through these tissues and can be focused with pinpoint accuracy at nerve targets deep inside our body, while radio waves cannot. Indeed, this is why sonar is used to image objects in the ocean, while radar is used to detect objects in the air. By using ultrasound to communicate with the neural dust, the sensors can be made smaller and placed deeper inside the body, by needle injection or other non-surgical approaches.”
The prototype neural dust “motes” currently measure 0.8 millimeters x 3 millimeters x 1 millimeter as assembled with commercially available components. The researchers estimate that by using custom parts and processes, they could manufacture individual motes of 1 cubic millimeter or less in size—possibly as small as 100 microns per side. The small size means multiple sensors could be placed near each other to make more precise recordings of nerve activity from many sites within a nerve or group of nerves.
Though their miniscule size is an achievement in itself, the dust motes are as impressive for the elegant simplicity of their engineering. Each sensor consists of only three main parts: a pair of electrodes to measure nerve signals, a custom transistor to amplify the signal, and a piezoelectric crystal that serves the dual purpose of converting the mechanical power of externally generated ultrasound waves into electrical power and communicating the recorded nerve activity. The neural dust system also includes an external transceiver board that uses ultrasound to power and communicate with the motes by emitting pulses of ultrasonic energy and listening for reflected pulses. During testing, the transceiver board was positioned approximately 9 millimeters away from the implant.
The piezoelectric crystal is key to the design of neural dust. Pulses of ultrasonic energy emitted by the external board affect the crystal. While some of the pulses are reflected back to the board, others cause the crystal to vibrate. This vibration converts the mechanical power of the ultrasound wave into electrical power, which is supplied to the dust mote’s transistor. Meanwhile, any extracellular voltage change across the mote’s two recording electrodes—generated by nerve activity—modulates the transistor’s gate, which changes the current flowing between the terminals of the crystal. These changes in current alter the vibration of the crystal and the intensity of its reflected ultrasonic energy. In this way, the shape of the reflected ultrasonic pulses encodes the electrophysiological voltage signal recorded by the implanted electrodes. This signal can be reconstructed externally by electronics attached to the transceiver board to interpret nerve activity. “One of the most appealing features of the neural dust sensors is that they are completely passive. Because there are no batteries to be changed, there is no need for further surgeries after the initial implant,” Weber said.
Another benefit of the system is that ultrasound is safe in the human body; ultrasound technologies have long been used for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes. Most existing wireless PNS sensors use electromagnetic energy in the form of radio waves for coupling and communication, but these systems become inefficient for sensors smaller than 5 millimeters. To work at smaller scales, these systems must increase their energy output, and much of that energy gets absorbed by surrounding tissue. Ultrasound has the advantage of penetrating deeper into tissue at lower power levels, reducing the risk of adverse effects while yielding excellent spatial resolution.
This proof of concept was developed under the first phase of the ElectRx program. The research team will continue to work on further miniaturizing the sensors, ensuring biocompatibility, increasing the portability of the transceiver board, and achieving clarity in signals processing when multiple sensors are placed near each other.
Image Caption: Each neural dust sensor consists of only three main parts: a pair of electrodes to measure nerve signals, a custom transistor to amplify the signal, and a piezoelectric crystal that serves the dual purpose of converting the mechanical power of externally generated ultrasound waves into electrical power and communicating the recorded nerve activity.
Thursday, May 6, 2021
DARPA Advisor Talking About Technology That Very Few People Know About
See here for DARPA Smart Dust and here for DARPA guinea pigs. See here for DARPA brain initiative projects. See here for the inevitability of Smart Dust. Watch this documentary about the history of human experimentation with MKUltra and the CIA. See Bill Clinton's apology for unlawful human experimentations in the past. See here for mind control patents.
Classified Technology: goo.gl/ZqTF28 Learn Intelligence Tactics: goo.gl/W5QrH9 Discredit Someone with Hi-Technology: goo.gl/WSxxjZ
Wednesday, December 9, 2020
Smart Dust Is Coming. Are You Ready?
Contributor
Enterprise & Cloud
Imagine a world where wireless devices are as small as a grain of salt. These miniaturized devices have sensors, cameras and communication mechanisms to transmit the data they collect back to a base in order to process. Today, you no longer have to imagine it: microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), often called motes, are real and they very well could be coming to a neighborhood near you. Whether this fact excites or strikes fear in you it’s good to know what it’s all about.
Enterprise & Cloud
Imagine a world where wireless devices are as small as a grain of salt. These miniaturized devices have sensors, cameras and communication mechanisms to transmit the data they collect back to a base in order to process. Today, you no longer have to imagine it: microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), often called motes, are real and they very well could be coming to a neighborhood near you. Whether this fact excites or strikes fear in you it’s good to know what it’s all about.
What can smart dust do?
Outfitted with miniature sensors, MEMS can detect everything from light to vibrations to temperature. With an incredible amount of power packed into its small size, MEMS combine sensing, an autonomous power supply, computing and wireless communication in a space that is typically only a few millimeters in volume. With such a small size, these devices can stay suspended in an environment just like a particle of dust. They can:
3D printing on the microscale
Since the components that make up these devices are 3D printed as one piece on a commercially available 3D printer, an incredible amount of complexity can be handled and some previous manufacturing barriers that restricted how small you can make things were overcome. The optical lenses that are created for these miniaturized sensors can achieve the finest quality images.
Practical applications of smart dust
The potential of smart dust to collect information about any environment in incredible detail could impact plenty of things in a variety of industries from safety to compliance to productivity. It’s like multiplying the internet of things technology millions or billions of times over. Here are just some of the ways it might be used:
Disadvantages of smart dust
There are still plenty of concerns with wide-scale adoption of smart dust that need to be sorted out. Here are a few disadvantages of smart dust:
Privacy concerns:
Many that have reservations about the real-world implications of smart dust are concerned about privacy issues. Since smart dust devices are miniature sensors they can record anything that they are programmed to record. Since they are so small, they are difficult to detect. Your imagination can run wild regarding the negative privacy implications when smart dust falls into the wrong hands.
Control:
Once billions of smart dust devices are deployed over an area it would be difficult to retrieve or capture them if necessary. Given how small they are, it would be challenging to detect them if you weren’t made aware of their presence. The volume of smart dust that could be engaged by a rogue individual, company or government to do harm would make it challenging for the authorities to control if necessary.
Cost:
As with any new technology, the cost to implement a smart dust system that includes the satellites and other elements required for full implementation is high. Until costs come down, it will be technology out of reach for many.
What should you do to prepare?
The entities who have led the development of smart dust technology since 1992 and large corporations such as General Electric, Cargill, IBM, Cisco Systems and more who invested in research for smart dust and viable applications believe this technology will be disruptive to economies and our world.
At the moment, many of the applications for smart dust are still in the concept stage. In fact, Gartner listed smart dust technology for the first time in its Gartner Hype Cycle in 2016. While the technology has forward momentum, there’s still quite a bit to resolve before you will see it impacting your organization. However, it’s important to pay attention to its trajectory of growth, because it’s no longer the fodder of science fiction. We might not know when it will progress to the point of wide-scale adoption, but we certainly know it’s a question of when rather than if.
Outfitted with miniature sensors, MEMS can detect everything from light to vibrations to temperature. With an incredible amount of power packed into its small size, MEMS combine sensing, an autonomous power supply, computing and wireless communication in a space that is typically only a few millimeters in volume. With such a small size, these devices can stay suspended in an environment just like a particle of dust. They can:
3D printing on the microscale
Since the components that make up these devices are 3D printed as one piece on a commercially available 3D printer, an incredible amount of complexity can be handled and some previous manufacturing barriers that restricted how small you can make things were overcome. The optical lenses that are created for these miniaturized sensors can achieve the finest quality images.
Practical applications of smart dust
The potential of smart dust to collect information about any environment in incredible detail could impact plenty of things in a variety of industries from safety to compliance to productivity. It’s like multiplying the internet of things technology millions or billions of times over. Here are just some of the ways it might be used:
Disadvantages of smart dust
There are still plenty of concerns with wide-scale adoption of smart dust that need to be sorted out. Here are a few disadvantages of smart dust:
Privacy concerns:
Many that have reservations about the real-world implications of smart dust are concerned about privacy issues. Since smart dust devices are miniature sensors they can record anything that they are programmed to record. Since they are so small, they are difficult to detect. Your imagination can run wild regarding the negative privacy implications when smart dust falls into the wrong hands.
Control:
Once billions of smart dust devices are deployed over an area it would be difficult to retrieve or capture them if necessary. Given how small they are, it would be challenging to detect them if you weren’t made aware of their presence. The volume of smart dust that could be engaged by a rogue individual, company or government to do harm would make it challenging for the authorities to control if necessary.
Cost:
As with any new technology, the cost to implement a smart dust system that includes the satellites and other elements required for full implementation is high. Until costs come down, it will be technology out of reach for many.
What should you do to prepare?
The entities who have led the development of smart dust technology since 1992 and large corporations such as General Electric, Cargill, IBM, Cisco Systems and more who invested in research for smart dust and viable applications believe this technology will be disruptive to economies and our world.
At the moment, many of the applications for smart dust are still in the concept stage. In fact, Gartner listed smart dust technology for the first time in its Gartner Hype Cycle in 2016. While the technology has forward momentum, there’s still quite a bit to resolve before you will see it impacting your organization. However, it’s important to pay attention to its trajectory of growth, because it’s no longer the fodder of science fiction. We might not know when it will progress to the point of wide-scale adoption, but we certainly know it’s a question of when rather than if.
Wednesday, August 15, 2018
How Smart Dust Could Spy On Your Brain
This is technology that intelligence agencies and organized crime currently have and are using against the public. For other articles on this topic, please see here. See here for more about DARPA smart dust. See here for more about the DARPA Artificial Intelligence Control Grid. Also see here and here for biowarfare.
=============================================================================
MIT Technology Review
=============================================================================
MIT Technology Review
Intelligent dust particles embedded in the brain
could form an entirely new form
of brain-machine interface, say engineers
The real-time monitoring of brain function has advanced in leaps and bounds in recent years.
That’s largely thanks to various new technologies that can monitor the collective behavior of groups of neurons, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging, magnetoencephalopathy and positron emission tomography.
This work is revolutionizing our understanding of the way the brain is structured and behaves. It has also lead to a new engineering discipline of brain-machine interfaces, which allows people to control machines by thought alone.
Impressive though these techniques are, they all suffer from inherent limitations such as limited spatial resolution, a lack of portability and extreme invasiveness.
Today, Dongjin Seo and pals at the University of California Berkeley reveal an entirely new way to study and interact with the brain. Their idea is to sprinkle electronic sensors the size of dust particles into the cortex and to interrogate them remotely using ultrasound. The ultrasound also powers this so-called neural dust.
Each particle of neural dust consists of standard CMOS circuits and sensors that measure the electrical activity in neurons nearby. This is coupled to a piezoelectric material that converts ultra-high-frequency sound waves into electrical signals and vice versa.
The neural dust is interrogated by another component placed beneath the scale but powered from outside the body. This generates the ultrasound that powers the neural dust and sensors that listen out for their response, rather like an RFID system.
The system is also tetherless - the data is collected and stored outside the body for later analysis. That gets around many of the limitations. The system is lower power, can have a high spatial resolution, and it is easily portable.
It is also rugged and can potentially provide a link over long periods of time.
“A major hurdle in brain-machine interfaces (BMI) is the lack of an implantable neural interface system that remains viable for a lifetime,” say Seo and co.
The difficulty is in designing and building such a system and today’s paper is a theoretical study of these challenges.
First is the problem of designing and building neural dust particles on a scale of roughly 100 micrometers that can send and receive signals in the harsh, warm and noisy environment within the body.
That’s why Seo and co have chosen ultrasound to send and receive data. They calculate that the power required to use electromagnetic waves on the scale would generate a damaging amount of heat because of the amount of energy the body absorbs and the troubling signal-to-noise ratios at this scale.
By contrast, ultrasound is a much more efficient and should allow the transmission of at least 10 million times more power than electromagnetic waves at the same scale.
Next is the problem of linking the electronics to the piezoelectric system that converts ultrasound to electronic signals and vice versa. Ensuring that the system works efficiently will be tricky given that it has to be packaged in an inert polymer or insulator film (which must also expose the recording electrodes to nearby neurons).
Finally, there is the challenge of designing and building the interrogation system that generates the ultrasound to power the entire array but at a low enough power to avoid heating skull and the brain.
On top of all this is the additional challenge of implanting the neural dust particles in the cortex. Seo and co say this can probably be done by fabricating the dust particles on the tips of a fine wire array, held in place by surface tension, for example. This array would be dipped into the cortex where the dust particles become embedded.
That’s an ambitious vision that is littered with challenges beyond the state-of-the-art. However, the team has a strong background in nanoelectromechanical systems and in the interface between electronic systems and cells.
Indeed, one of the authors, Michel Maharbiz, developed the world’s first remotely controlled beetle a few years ago, a development that was named one of the top 10 emerging technologies of 2009 by Technology Review.
These guys are clearly not afraid to take on big challenges. It’ll be interesting to see how they fare.
That’s largely thanks to various new technologies that can monitor the collective behavior of groups of neurons, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging, magnetoencephalopathy and positron emission tomography.
This work is revolutionizing our understanding of the way the brain is structured and behaves. It has also lead to a new engineering discipline of brain-machine interfaces, which allows people to control machines by thought alone.
Impressive though these techniques are, they all suffer from inherent limitations such as limited spatial resolution, a lack of portability and extreme invasiveness.
Today, Dongjin Seo and pals at the University of California Berkeley reveal an entirely new way to study and interact with the brain. Their idea is to sprinkle electronic sensors the size of dust particles into the cortex and to interrogate them remotely using ultrasound. The ultrasound also powers this so-called neural dust.
Each particle of neural dust consists of standard CMOS circuits and sensors that measure the electrical activity in neurons nearby. This is coupled to a piezoelectric material that converts ultra-high-frequency sound waves into electrical signals and vice versa.
The neural dust is interrogated by another component placed beneath the scale but powered from outside the body. This generates the ultrasound that powers the neural dust and sensors that listen out for their response, rather like an RFID system.
The system is also tetherless - the data is collected and stored outside the body for later analysis. That gets around many of the limitations. The system is lower power, can have a high spatial resolution, and it is easily portable.
It is also rugged and can potentially provide a link over long periods of time.
“A major hurdle in brain-machine interfaces (BMI) is the lack of an implantable neural interface system that remains viable for a lifetime,” say Seo and co.
The difficulty is in designing and building such a system and today’s paper is a theoretical study of these challenges.
First is the problem of designing and building neural dust particles on a scale of roughly 100 micrometers that can send and receive signals in the harsh, warm and noisy environment within the body.
That’s why Seo and co have chosen ultrasound to send and receive data. They calculate that the power required to use electromagnetic waves on the scale would generate a damaging amount of heat because of the amount of energy the body absorbs and the troubling signal-to-noise ratios at this scale.
By contrast, ultrasound is a much more efficient and should allow the transmission of at least 10 million times more power than electromagnetic waves at the same scale.
Next is the problem of linking the electronics to the piezoelectric system that converts ultrasound to electronic signals and vice versa. Ensuring that the system works efficiently will be tricky given that it has to be packaged in an inert polymer or insulator film (which must also expose the recording electrodes to nearby neurons).
Finally, there is the challenge of designing and building the interrogation system that generates the ultrasound to power the entire array but at a low enough power to avoid heating skull and the brain.
On top of all this is the additional challenge of implanting the neural dust particles in the cortex. Seo and co say this can probably be done by fabricating the dust particles on the tips of a fine wire array, held in place by surface tension, for example. This array would be dipped into the cortex where the dust particles become embedded.
That’s an ambitious vision that is littered with challenges beyond the state-of-the-art. However, the team has a strong background in nanoelectromechanical systems and in the interface between electronic systems and cells.
Indeed, one of the authors, Michel Maharbiz, developed the world’s first remotely controlled beetle a few years ago, a development that was named one of the top 10 emerging technologies of 2009 by Technology Review.
These guys are clearly not afraid to take on big challenges. It’ll be interesting to see how they fare.
Wednesday, September 6, 2017
'Smart Dust' Aims To Monitor Everything
Click here for another article about smart dust.
By John D. Sutter, CNN (2010)
Palo Alto, California (CNN) -- In the 1990s, a researcher named Kris Pister dreamed up a wild future in which people would sprinkle the Earth with countless tiny sensors, no larger than grains of rice.
These "smart dust" particles, as he called them, would monitor everything, acting like electronic nerve endings for the planet. Fitted with computing power, sensing equipment, wireless radios and long battery life, the smart dust would make observations and relay mountains of real-time data about people, cities and the natural environment.
Now, a version of Pister's smart dust fantasy is starting to become reality. "It's exciting. It's been a long time coming," said Pister, a computing professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
"I coined the phrase 14 years ago. So smart dust has taken a while, but it's finally here."
Maybe not exactly how he envisioned it. But there has been progress.
The latest news comes from the computer and printing company Hewlett-Packard, which recently announced it's working on a project it calls the "Central Nervous System for the Earth." In coming years, the company plans to deploy a trillion sensors all over the planet.
The wireless devices would check to see if ecosystems are healthy, detect earthquakes more rapidly, predict traffic patterns and monitor energy use. The idea is that accidents could be prevented and energy could be saved if people knew more about the world in real time, instead of when workers check on these issues only occasionally.
HP will take its first step toward this goal in about two years, said Pete Hartwell, a senior researcher at HP Labs in Palo Alto. The company has made plans with Royal Dutch Shell to install 1 million matchbook-size monitors to aid in oil exploration by measuring rock vibrations and movement, he said. Those sensors, which already have been developed, will cover a 6-square-mile area.
That will be the largest smart dust deployment to date, he said.
"We just think now, the technology has reached a point where it makes basic sense for us ... to get this out of the lab and into reality," Hartwell said.
Despite the recent excitement, there's still much confusion in the computing industry about what exactly smart dust is.
For starters, the sensors being deployed and developed today are much larger and clunkier than flecks of dust. HP's sensors -- accelerometers like those in the iPhone and Droid phone, but about 1,000 times more powerful -- are about the size of matchbooks. When they're enclosed in a metal box for protection, they're about the size of a VHS tape.
So what makes a smart dust sensor different from a weather station or a traffic monitor?
Size is one factor. Smart dust sensors must be relatively small and portable. But technology hasn't advanced far enough to manufacture the sensors on the scale of millimeters for commercial use (although Berkeley researchers are trying to make one that's a cubic millimeter).
Wireless connections are a big distinguisher, too. A building's thermostat is most likely hard-wired. A smart dust sensor might gauge temperature, but it would be battery-powered and would communicate wirelessly with the internet and with other sensors.
The sheer number of sensors in the network is what truly makes a smart dust project different from other efforts to record data about the world, said Deborah Estrin, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Los Angeles, who works in the field. Smart dust researchers tend to talk in the millions, billions and trillions.
Some say reality has diverged so far from the smart dust concept that it's time to dump that term in favor or something less sexy. "Wireless sensor networks" or "meshes" are terms finding greater acceptance with some researchers.
Estrin said it's important to ditch the idea that smart dust sensors would be disposable.
Sensors have to be designed for specific purposes and spread out on the land intentionally -- not scattered in the wind, as smart dust was initially pitched, she said.
Despite these differences, researchers say the smart-dust theory that monitoring everything will benefit humanity remains essentially unchanged.
And there are a number of real-world projects that, in one way or another, seek to use wireless sensors to take the Earth's vital signs.
Wireless sensors currently monitor farms, factories, data centers and bridges to promote efficiency and understanding of how these systems work, researchers said in interviews. In all of these cases, the sensor networks are deployed for a specific purpose.
For example, a company called Streetline has installed 12,000 sensors on parking spots and highways in San Francisco. The sensors don't know everything that's going on at those parking spots. They are equipped with magnetometers to sense whether or not a huge metal object -- hopefully a car -- is sitting on the spot. That data will soon be available to people who can use it to figure out where to park, said Tod Dykstra, Streetline's CEO. It also tells the cities if the meters have expired.
Other sensors are equipped to measure vibration in factories and oil refineries to spot machine problems and inefficiencies before they cause trouble. Still others might pick up data about temperature, chemistry or sound. Tiny cameras or radars also can be tacked onto the data-collecting network to detect the presence of people or vehicles. The power of these networks is that they eventually can be connected, said David Culler, a computer science professor at UC Berkeley.
Culler says the development of these wireless sensor networks is analogous to the creation of the World Wide Web. What's being created with the smart dust idea is a "Real World Web," he said.
But he said we're still early on in that progression. "Netscape [for the wireless sensor network] hasn't quite happened," he said.
Even when deployed for science or the public, some people still get a Big Brother feeling -- the uncomfortable sense of being under constant, secret surveillance -- from the idea of putting trillions of monitors all over the world.
"It's a very, very, very huge potential privacy invasion because we're talking about very, very small sensors that can be undetectable, effectively," said Lee Tien, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy advocate. "They are there in such numbers that you really can't do anything about them in terms of easy countermeasures."
That doesn't mean that researchers should stop working on smart dust. But they should be mindful of privacy as the work progresses, he said. Pister said the wireless frequencies that smart dust sensors use to communicate -- which work kind of like Wi-Fi -- have security built into them. So the data is public only if the person or company that installed the sensor wants it to be, he said.
"Clearly, there are security concerns and privacy concerns," he said, "and the good news is that when the radio technology was being developed for this stuff, it was shortly after all of the big concerns about Wi-Fi security. ... We've got all the security tools we need underneath to make this information private."
Further privacy concerns may arise if another vision for smart dust comes true. Some researchers are looking into making mobile phones into sensors. In this scenario, the billions of people roaming the Earth with cell phones become the "smart dust."
Smart dust researchers say their theory of monitoring the world -- however it's realized -- will benefit people and the environment. More information is better information, Pister said. "Having more sensors improves the efficiency of a system and reduces the demand and reduces waste," he said. "So all of that is just straight goodness."
Hartwell, the HP researcher, says the only way people can combat huge problems like climate change and biodiversity loss is to have more information about what's going on. "Frankly, I think we have to do it, from a sustainability and environmental standpoint," he said. Even though the first application of HP's "Central Nervous System for the Earth" project will be commercial, Hartwell says the motives behind smart dust are altruistic.
"People ask me what my job is, and I say, well, I'm going to save the world," he said.
By John D. Sutter, CNN (2010)
Palo Alto, California (CNN) -- In the 1990s, a researcher named Kris Pister dreamed up a wild future in which people would sprinkle the Earth with countless tiny sensors, no larger than grains of rice.
These "smart dust" particles, as he called them, would monitor everything, acting like electronic nerve endings for the planet. Fitted with computing power, sensing equipment, wireless radios and long battery life, the smart dust would make observations and relay mountains of real-time data about people, cities and the natural environment.
Now, a version of Pister's smart dust fantasy is starting to become reality. "It's exciting. It's been a long time coming," said Pister, a computing professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
"I coined the phrase 14 years ago. So smart dust has taken a while, but it's finally here."
Maybe not exactly how he envisioned it. But there has been progress.
The latest news comes from the computer and printing company Hewlett-Packard, which recently announced it's working on a project it calls the "Central Nervous System for the Earth." In coming years, the company plans to deploy a trillion sensors all over the planet.
The wireless devices would check to see if ecosystems are healthy, detect earthquakes more rapidly, predict traffic patterns and monitor energy use. The idea is that accidents could be prevented and energy could be saved if people knew more about the world in real time, instead of when workers check on these issues only occasionally.
HP will take its first step toward this goal in about two years, said Pete Hartwell, a senior researcher at HP Labs in Palo Alto. The company has made plans with Royal Dutch Shell to install 1 million matchbook-size monitors to aid in oil exploration by measuring rock vibrations and movement, he said. Those sensors, which already have been developed, will cover a 6-square-mile area.
That will be the largest smart dust deployment to date, he said.
"We just think now, the technology has reached a point where it makes basic sense for us ... to get this out of the lab and into reality," Hartwell said.
Smart dust (minus the 'dust')
For starters, the sensors being deployed and developed today are much larger and clunkier than flecks of dust. HP's sensors -- accelerometers like those in the iPhone and Droid phone, but about 1,000 times more powerful -- are about the size of matchbooks. When they're enclosed in a metal box for protection, they're about the size of a VHS tape.
So what makes a smart dust sensor different from a weather station or a traffic monitor?
Size is one factor. Smart dust sensors must be relatively small and portable. But technology hasn't advanced far enough to manufacture the sensors on the scale of millimeters for commercial use (although Berkeley researchers are trying to make one that's a cubic millimeter).
Wireless connections are a big distinguisher, too. A building's thermostat is most likely hard-wired. A smart dust sensor might gauge temperature, but it would be battery-powered and would communicate wirelessly with the internet and with other sensors.
The sheer number of sensors in the network is what truly makes a smart dust project different from other efforts to record data about the world, said Deborah Estrin, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Los Angeles, who works in the field. Smart dust researchers tend to talk in the millions, billions and trillions.
Some say reality has diverged so far from the smart dust concept that it's time to dump that term in favor or something less sexy. "Wireless sensor networks" or "meshes" are terms finding greater acceptance with some researchers.
Estrin said it's important to ditch the idea that smart dust sensors would be disposable.
Sensors have to be designed for specific purposes and spread out on the land intentionally -- not scattered in the wind, as smart dust was initially pitched, she said.
'Real-world web'
And there are a number of real-world projects that, in one way or another, seek to use wireless sensors to take the Earth's vital signs.
Wireless sensors currently monitor farms, factories, data centers and bridges to promote efficiency and understanding of how these systems work, researchers said in interviews. In all of these cases, the sensor networks are deployed for a specific purpose.
For example, a company called Streetline has installed 12,000 sensors on parking spots and highways in San Francisco. The sensors don't know everything that's going on at those parking spots. They are equipped with magnetometers to sense whether or not a huge metal object -- hopefully a car -- is sitting on the spot. That data will soon be available to people who can use it to figure out where to park, said Tod Dykstra, Streetline's CEO. It also tells the cities if the meters have expired.
Other sensors are equipped to measure vibration in factories and oil refineries to spot machine problems and inefficiencies before they cause trouble. Still others might pick up data about temperature, chemistry or sound. Tiny cameras or radars also can be tacked onto the data-collecting network to detect the presence of people or vehicles. The power of these networks is that they eventually can be connected, said David Culler, a computer science professor at UC Berkeley.
Culler says the development of these wireless sensor networks is analogous to the creation of the World Wide Web. What's being created with the smart dust idea is a "Real World Web," he said.
But he said we're still early on in that progression. "Netscape [for the wireless sensor network] hasn't quite happened," he said.
Big Brother effect
Even when deployed for science or the public, some people still get a Big Brother feeling -- the uncomfortable sense of being under constant, secret surveillance -- from the idea of putting trillions of monitors all over the world.
"It's a very, very, very huge potential privacy invasion because we're talking about very, very small sensors that can be undetectable, effectively," said Lee Tien, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy advocate. "They are there in such numbers that you really can't do anything about them in terms of easy countermeasures."
That doesn't mean that researchers should stop working on smart dust. But they should be mindful of privacy as the work progresses, he said. Pister said the wireless frequencies that smart dust sensors use to communicate -- which work kind of like Wi-Fi -- have security built into them. So the data is public only if the person or company that installed the sensor wants it to be, he said.
"Clearly, there are security concerns and privacy concerns," he said, "and the good news is that when the radio technology was being developed for this stuff, it was shortly after all of the big concerns about Wi-Fi security. ... We've got all the security tools we need underneath to make this information private."
Further privacy concerns may arise if another vision for smart dust comes true. Some researchers are looking into making mobile phones into sensors. In this scenario, the billions of people roaming the Earth with cell phones become the "smart dust."
Bright future
Smart dust researchers say their theory of monitoring the world -- however it's realized -- will benefit people and the environment. More information is better information, Pister said. "Having more sensors improves the efficiency of a system and reduces the demand and reduces waste," he said. "So all of that is just straight goodness."
Hartwell, the HP researcher, says the only way people can combat huge problems like climate change and biodiversity loss is to have more information about what's going on. "Frankly, I think we have to do it, from a sustainability and environmental standpoint," he said. Even though the first application of HP's "Central Nervous System for the Earth" project will be commercial, Hartwell says the motives behind smart dust are altruistic.
"People ask me what my job is, and I say, well, I'm going to save the world," he said.
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