Memristor Video: Embedded Cellphone Sensors

Interesting video about Memristors with Stan Williams of HP Research. Starts out with a standard “the benefit to the consumer video recorder is enormous,” [not literal quote!], but luckily moves into a much more interesting point, which Dr. Williams discusses a little more in depth: the benefit of the technology vis a vis embedded cell phone sensor networks. Nanotech embedded chemical sensors, combined with the benefits of memristor circuits, could allow pollution and air quality monitoring:

“…by having people act as local nodes on a network, as well, where their pda or cellphone has sensors embedded within it, as they are walking around, they are essentially sampling the environment themselves…”

Clearly, the lower power consumption and functional density of memristor circuits will play a big role in networked, embedded sensor development, although processing large amounts of high speed storage directly into computations and software design, especially where they will impact larger social demographics, will clearly require some innovation in language. For example, placing a diabetic sensor (what, no cellphone insulin dispenser yet?) into cellphones would have to involve the ever-present regulatory layer of medical regulations, and monitoring pollution levels would open many previously “unpolluted” experiences to being suddenly “polluted”, just through the newfound ability to detect them.

As Frank Herbert stated in an apparent book on home computers and the Biomachine in 1984: (and clearly, cellular is the new microwave!)

“Mass storage and the data banks will exist someplace outside your body, linked to you by something like microwave.
That is a clear direction of research and development. The major barrier to this prediction is not the hardware, but the software ­programs.
Before that day comes we will have to match our high-data-rate multichannel system to the computer’s one-step-at-a-time but high-speed system. We will have to mesh extremely different ways of coding infor­mation. That is a problem in translation, and that is primarily a software concern.” Frank Herbert

Brave New World!