GFD writes: "The EETimes has a story about a DARPA program to develop a new class of electronics and system architecture based on smart fabrics. Some of the more interesting challenges include networking protocols and fault tolerance. Routing between buttons? What happens if your CPU gets a rip??"
Battlefield diagnostic shirts...
by
BMazurek
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
A friend of mine did his M.Sc. in mobile computing. He was attending a conference in probably 97 or 98, and there was a guy there giving a presentation on just this sort of thing.
The primary purpose in this case seemed to be diagnosing battlefield injuries as they happen. If someone gets injured in the battlefield, the piercing of the shirt would be used as a trigger to contact medical personnel. The positioning of the broken fibres would give the location of the wound. The fibres would also convey information about the amount of blood as well as any other fluids that might be present at the wound site. They would use built-in sensors to attempt to determine the trajectory of the projectile.
The result? Medical teams could be dispatched immediately, and would know (more or less) the kind of wound, and what they were likely to find when they got to the wounded soldier.
Of course, the requirements were also for a shirt that could be field washed several hundred times, and costed relatively little.
I completely agree. Some things definately do NOT need to be 'smart' or otherwise "enhanced". On the other hand, some things that are enhanced would be great. I'd love to be able to pay a parking ticket right on the ticket. When paid, the ticket changes to a reciept.
Flags that were smart would be cool. Smart fabrics in general are neat because they have the potential to require less closet space. It would be very cool to wear a suit that could change color from business grey or green to funeral black. You wouldn't have to go home to go to the wake of a coworker. Similarly, road workers outfits could change color from the usual to International Emergency Orange (yes, that color has a name)when they're on the job. Smart curtains would be neat, ones that can change color when you want to redecorate, or change opacity on demand (this already exists in windows, though).
I'd hate to see a "smart" glove (I don't want my clothes to know where my hands have been), or a smart beer can (unless it can make more beer). I certainly don't need a smart door, but a smart key would be great (one key for you car, house, garage, desk at work etc...), unless you lose it, then you'd need a backup.
Come to think of it, I can't think of many things that wouldn't be better if it were "enhanced", but those few things definately DON'T need to be enhanced.
-- The Dopester "Yes, I'm a Karma Whore, but I'm doing it to pay my way through school."
interesting related thing
by
WillWare
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Four or five years ago, some folks at MIT were
looking at similar things. They had a DARPA grant
to figure out how to program sloppily-networked
unreliable processors, and came up with a field
they called
amorphous computing.
They used an interesting set of conservative assumptions, so that their code could run on a wide range of hopefully-soon-to-be-cheap hardware:
Processors are too numerous to merit individual names. Any interaction between programmer and processors is a bulk operation; processors are never individually addressed. Think broadcast architecture.
Processors are unreliable. Any individual processor may fail at any time, or may be broken already at power-up.
No assumption of reliable geometry: processors have no a-priori knowledge of their physical location in the cloud.
Weak assumptions about connectivity: each processor is connected to N close neighbors, where the probability distribution of N is approximately known. Connections are unreliable and may be time-varying.
All processors are assumed to be manufactured with the same program in ROM. (This doesn't preclude the possibility of a distributed boot loader.)
Remarkably, many of these hardships can be overcome by clever programming, and some kinds of algorithms turn out to be idiomatic in this kind of programming model. Interesting stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
The primary purpose in this case seemed to be diagnosing battlefield injuries as they happen. If someone gets injured in the battlefield, the piercing of the shirt would be used as a trigger to contact medical personnel. The positioning of the broken fibres would give the location of the wound. The fibres would also convey information about the amount of blood as well as any other fluids that might be present at the wound site. They would use built-in sensors to attempt to determine the trajectory of the projectile.
The result? Medical teams could be dispatched immediately, and would know (more or less) the kind of wound, and what they were likely to find when they got to the wounded soldier.
Of course, the requirements were also for a shirt that could be field washed several hundred times, and costed relatively little.
Sounded like an extremely cool presentation...
I completely agree. Some things definately do NOT need to be 'smart' or otherwise "enhanced". On the other hand, some things that are enhanced would be great. I'd love to be able to pay a parking ticket right on the ticket. When paid, the ticket changes to a reciept.
Flags that were smart would be cool. Smart fabrics in general are neat because they have the potential to require less closet space. It would be very cool to wear a suit that could change color from business grey or green to funeral black. You wouldn't have to go home to go to the wake of a coworker. Similarly, road workers outfits could change color from the usual to International Emergency Orange (yes, that color has a name)when they're on the job. Smart curtains would be neat, ones that can change color when you want to redecorate, or change opacity on demand (this already exists in windows, though).
I'd hate to see a "smart" glove (I don't want my clothes to know where my hands have been), or a smart beer can (unless it can make more beer). I certainly don't need a smart door, but a smart key would be great (one key for you car, house, garage, desk at work etc...), unless you lose it, then you'd need a backup.
Come to think of it, I can't think of many things that wouldn't be better if it were "enhanced", but those few things definately DON'T need to be enhanced.
The Dopester
"Yes, I'm a Karma Whore, but I'm doing it to pay my way through school."
- Processors are too numerous to merit individual names. Any interaction between programmer and processors is a bulk operation; processors are never individually addressed. Think broadcast architecture.
- Processors are unreliable. Any individual processor may fail at any time, or may be broken already at power-up.
- No assumption of reliable geometry: processors have no a-priori knowledge of their physical location in the cloud.
- Weak assumptions about connectivity: each processor is connected to N close neighbors, where the probability distribution of N is approximately known. Connections are unreliable and may be time-varying.
- All processors are assumed to be manufactured with the same program in ROM. (This doesn't preclude the possibility of a distributed boot loader.)
Remarkably, many of these hardships can be overcome by clever programming, and some kinds of algorithms turn out to be idiomatic in this kind of programming model. Interesting stuff.WWJD for a Klondike Bar?