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Spray-On Computers
Jack William Bell writes "Edinburgh University has funding for a program to create spray on computers. The basic idea is to make thousands of tiny 'silicon specks' or 'smart sand' (a step larger than smart dust) which work together via wireless networking to provide 'ubiquitous computing.' No, the idea itself isn't new. But it is interesting to see someone actually working on it. The initial application is a spray you apply to the chest of heart patients, creating a sensor array to report their health back to the hospital."
A spray-on computer is way to do IT
FIONA MACGREGOR EDUCATION REPORTER
SPRAY-ON computers the size of a grain of sand are set to transform information technology across the world thanks to pioneering research at Edinburgh University.
Scientists at the institution have just been awarded a 1.3 million grant to develop the "ubiquitous computing" technology which uses tiny semiconductor specks that can sense, compute and communicate without wires.
The study is set to put Scotland at the forefront of the next great leap forward for information technology and is likely to bring huge advances in all walks of life.
Researchers are already working with staff at Edinburgh hospitals to develop a method of using the computers to monitor heart patients at home.
They plan to spray the nano computers on to the chests of coronary patients, where the tiny cells would record a patient's health and transmit information back to a hospital computer.
Head of the project Professor DK Arvid said: "This research is very much looking to the future. At the moment, computer information is processed very discreetly, you either have a laptop, or a PC.
"In the future, computers will be able to be diffused into the environment. There won't be a sharp division - barricades will just disappear into the background.
"One way to achieve that will be computers the size of a grain of sand. Just by spraying them on to objects, you can computerise them. They would create a network which can transmit wirelessly to each other.
"In a cubic millimetre, you can have a sensor for heat, pressure, light and so on, but also a computer and wireless technology.
The professor said the team was already involved with doctors at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary and the Western General Hospital.
He said: "We are already working with cardiologists on a spray which would go on the chest and monitor the performance of the heart in an unobtrusive way. It means you don't have to have a large machine to lug around or go into hospital.
"After surgery there is great pressure on hospital beds yet there is no reason to stay other than to keep hooked up to a machine.
"With this you get into the home - this research is going to have an impact on real life."
The funding for the project, which also involves Napier, St Andrews, Glasgow and Strathclyde universities, has come from the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council.
The money will allow the scientists to see the technology working to cre micael's retardnesses within four years.
Prof Arvid said the spray-on computers could be in shops, hospitals and schools within ten years.
"At the moment if you want to interface you have to use a key board or a mouse, which is very unwieldy. With this you could take a pen and spray it and it becomes an interface in its own right."
The advance is set to put Edinburgh and Scotland at the forefront of the industry.
Bill Furness of Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce said: "This has huge potential for applications in commerce, health and education.
"From the business community's point of view, we are increasingly looking at the future of our city.
"Part of the answer to that is the vision of a world-class centre for research and innovation.
"This particular development sounds a very strong building block towards that vision."
Dr Simon Maxwell, part of the blood pressure unit at the Western General Hospital in Edinburgh University's department of medicine, described the technology as very "exciting". He said: "This will allow us to monitor patients much more accurately than we have ever been able to do and for more prolonged periods."
I'm not Seth.
The idea of spraying silicon chips directly onto patients should be approached with caution.
Ever build one of those crystal radio kits you got from RadioShack as a kid? Those had way larger components than we're talking here, and they were powered by small electric currents from the AM (Amplitude Modulation) radio waves.
With these spray-on computers, you could easily add a small circuitry that could provide power just from stray radio waves. IIRC you would just need a magnetic coil, a diode and a transistor. That would provide plenty of power for the scale we're talking here.
There is only one working solution: to etch the antenna on the surface of the chip, and then to point some radar transmitter at it. However it will cook you within seconds :-)
As I said, those guys need to come up with a battery before they can think of anything else. This is especially important if they want to use wireless, since it involves parting with the energy.
Yeah, complexity grows exponentially, but only if a cell is allowed to comunicate with any other, that's not the 'right' way to do it.
Local communications, seeking global behaviour (biological-like way) seems to be a better way.
no nano- means extremely small, it comes from the greek word nanos meaning dwarf
XML's textual nature keeps XML documents "open". I did a Google search a while ago when trying to determine whether there was a standard scheme for putting binary data into XML, and came across somebody discussing parse times for XML. He'd written a program which parsed XML and saved the parsed version in a binary format, and found that it was actually faster to just parse the XML again than to reconstruct the information from his binary format.
On one hand, sure, perhaps his coding wasn't up to the level of those who'd written the XML parser, which might account for the slower loading.
On the other hand, there's a good chance that someone writing an XML parser intended for general inclusion within other programs is paying a lot more attention to doing things right (in terms of speed, security, etc.) than the person who writes a quick data-parsing routine.
Computers don't care if humans can read their data, sure. But, humans do. Parsing a simple, well-defined text format isn't computationally expensive, and makes the job easier for those who might have cause to view the data.
Finally, XML tags can and do carry important semantic information. It's much easier to write a program to parse an arbitrary unknown XML schema (say, GnuCash's file format) than to have to reverse-engineer an arbitrary unknown binary format (yes, I've done both). This is important because it helps to ensure that the data isn't quite as bound to the program -- parsing and conversion between schemas is generally much easier than, say, translating a WordPerfect document to MS Word format.
Hans Reiser has even decided to use text in his transaction-control syscalls:
Text parsing isn't as bad as people like to make it, as long as you aren't parsing a horribly ugly specification (like, say, C++ code).
Besides, how is carrying something on top of HTTP going to introduce new security holes? I haven't been able to decide where you are implying the issues might arise.
Somebody get that guy an ambulance!
Its interessting to reflect a bit on current technology when discussing "science fiction" like this.
Reseachers at Berkely have developed a single chip sensor node called the spec . Although this node lacks sensors, it clearly demonstrates the potential of the approach, even using existing technology and implements the basic platform for a sensor node in 5 mm (thats 2.379E-5 cubic furlongs for the metricly challenged). This node have very low power requirements and are capable of communication of more than 10 meter at 19kbps.
This year the ACM holds its first international conference on sensor systems, SenSys 2003. A number of problems will most likely be adressed by this conference, moving the sensor network research forward.
Personally I think the visions are quite viable. It is correct that power sources (esp. batteries) are a major trouble, but there are many sources to be investigated, and solutions will be found. The worst problem with sensor networks are probably privacy (you thought RFID's were bad? How about sensors that you can not see, that communicates encrypted on unknown random spread spectrums freqs?) - Vernor Vinge have written a couple of (science fiction) books, where sensor networks are used in ways that will be a bit scary to the average privacy-aware slashdot reader....