Database Reference
In-Depth Information
applications range from the silly to the useful to the creepy. For example,
a wristband that measures sleep activity could trigger an automated coffee
maker when the user gets a poor night's sleep and needs to be alert the
next day. The smell of coffee brewing could even be used as an alarm.
The communication between these systems no longer needs to be direct
or specialized, as envisioned in the various “smart home” demonstration
projects during the past 50 years. These tools are possible today using tools
like If This Then That (IFTTT) and other publicly available systems built on
infrastructure similar to those in this topic.
On a more serious note, important biometric data can be measured in real
time by remote facilities in a way that has previously been available only
when using highly specialized and expensive equipment, which has limited
its application to high-stress environments like space exploration. Now this
data can be collected for an individual over a long period of time (this is
known in statistics as longitudinal data) and pooled with other users' data
to provide a more complete picture of human biometric norms. Instead of
taking a blood pressure test once a year in a cold room wearing a paper
dress, a person's blood pressure might be tracked over time with the goal of
“heading off problems at the pass.”
Outside of health, there has long been the idea of “smart dust”—large
collections of inexpensive sensors that can be distributed into an area of
the world and remotely queried to collect interesting data. The limitation
of these devices has largely been the expense required to manufacture
relatively specialized pieces of equipment. This has been solved by the
commodification of data collection hardware and software (such as the
smartphone) and is now known as the Internet of Things. Not only will
people continually monitor themselves, objects will continually monitor
themselves as well. This has a variety of potential applications, such as
traffic management within cities to making agriculture more efficient
through better monitoring of soil conditions.
The important piece is that this information can be streaming through
commodity systems rather than hardware and software specialized for
collection. These commodity systems already exist, and the software
required to analyze the data is already available. All that remains to be
developed are the novel applications for collecting the data.
