HP announces sensors for its “Central Nervous System for the Earth” (CeNSE)

HP has taken its MEMs expertise, developed to provide fluid sensors for printer cartridges, and uses it to create accelerometers that are up to 1,000 times more sensitive than today’s commercial products. HP’s Big, Hairy, Audacious Plan is to create the central nervous system  for the Internet of Things which it calls the  "Central Nervous System for the Earth" (CeNSE). The tiny and “exquisitely sensitive” MEMs accelerometers are the first CeNSE sensors to be implemented within the R&D program, but follow-up sensors will include light, temperature, barometric pressure, airflow and humidity.

The first unit to go into the field, pictured below, “can detect a 10 femtometer change in the position of its center chip. That’s less than one-billionth the width of a human hair. As a result, it can measure changes to acceleration in the micro-gravity range. That’s about 1,000 times more sensitive than accelerometers used in a Wii, an iPhone or an automobile’s airbag system.”  Elsewhere in the announcement the company refers to device noise density performance as being “in the sub 100 nano-g per square root Hz range.” Impressive.

HP’s announcement also includes this statement:

“Monitoring a bridge like the San Francisco Golden Gate might take 10,000 nodes… Figure a million or so for a big business application, such as cargo shipping. To enervate the Earth, about a trillion should do the trick. At that rate, sensor nodes must cost next to nothing, yet measure everything.”

HP hasn’t said whether the device in the photo includes the radio/communication capability needed by a node as well as the energy-harvesting capability. To draw attention to the capability of the sensor without also talking about the communication and power needs of the nodes seems to be focusing on the relatively “easy” part of a very difficult problem. One implication of this announcement is that HP sees in the near future that the power needs of sense nodes will be provided by very, very small solar cells (because solar is probably the only way to meet the low-cost requirement), and that the computing, transceiver portion will shrink in size and drop in power use to a fraction of what they are now.

And then there’s the processing and storage needs created by trillions of sensors. “At a typical data rate, one million sensors running 24 hours a day would require 50 hard disks running in parallel to capture the 20 petabytes of data created in just six months.”

Yep, it’s a Big, Hairy, Audacious Plan

Via ReadWriteWeb.
[Based on your comments, I took another whack at explaining The Internet of Things.]