Smart-Its
Interconnected Embedded Technology for Creation of Aware
Artefacts and Emergence of Collective Awareness
The project's vision is that everyday objects can be enabled as
interconnected information artefacts. Object become artefacts by
attaching very small computing devices, Smart-Its, to
them.
Smart-Its will be as cheap, as unobtrusive and as
generic as state-of-the-art smart labels (aka radio tags, active
tags), which are about to succeed the omnipresent barcode. Unlike
smart labels, Smart-Its will not just have a memory but
also provide perception of their environment (sensors),
communication with peers (short range ad-hoc network), and
customisable behavior (application execution environment).
For example, a coffee cup would be empowered with a
Smart-It customised to derive events such as
just_refilled, carried_around, and
drunken_from from the integrated
sensors. Smart-Its-labeled produce will compute the
sell-by-date dynamically from tracking the environment
(e.g. temperature and exposure to light).
Moreover, in our vision everyday objects will not just be
empowered on a one-by-one basis. Smart-Its can
interconnect large families of everyday objects and empower
collective awareness and behavior.
The example here is a collection of Smart-Its-enabled
children's toys. A toy will not only understand its own context
but also that of other toys nearby: imagine your daughter's doll
beaming with joy when its buddies are about and looking scared
alone in the dark!
Smart-Its-enabled objects have a collective ability to
make sense of the situations in which they are contextually
embedded.
Other examples of Smart-Its-labelled objects may be
scattered personal belongings, goods in a store, or parts in a
processing chain.
Read more about the
Smart-Its Project ...
