In the near future, Smart Dust, a surveillance device the size of a grain of sand, will be available to monitor our every movement.

In a collaborative effort with several universities, UW-Madison is assisting the military in developing wireless microelectromechanical sensors, also known as MEMS.

Similar technology is already being used in Afghanistan to track human movements.

UW engineering professor Parameswaran Ramanathan, recently received a $725,000 five-year grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to find a method to get the devices to communicate with each other using the least amount of power.

The millimeter-scale sensing and communicating devices will have sensors that measure chemical and physical stimuli. That information will be sent on to a node, interpreted and transmitted to satellites, computers, or hand-held receivers.

UW’s team will be trying to come up with the most efficient ways to have the MEMS talk to each other. It is a difficult and necessary feat because the devices currently have limited power resources since their tiny structure cannot accommodate large batteries.

Several strategies are in the works to solve this problem. One includes having the devices wake up only when an appropriate signal comes near. Using solar power to recharge the MEMS is also a possibility.

Since the Smart Dust is meant to be inexpensive, it can be mass-produced so that hundreds can be released to monitor an area.

“Aircraft could sprinkle large numbers of these integrated devices over an area to construct a surveillance network capable of monitoring, detecting, and tracking threats from a variety of sources including vehicles, persons and biochemical agents,” Ramanathan said. “Of course there are dozens of non-military application as well. Sensor networks could be deployed to help geologists, limnologists and others study the environment in ways that currently aren’t possible.”

Though its primary military use is surveillance, MEMS can be used to monitor the weather, collect data in space or track firefighters battling large forest fires.

The recent advances in wireless communication and the ability to build sensors on a nanoscale make this technology possible in as soon as five years, though some components are already being put to use.

“One of the astounding things to me is you talk about Smart Dust, and it sounds so futuristic, but it’s not,” Jim Beal, associate director of engineering external relations, said. “They can do it already. It’s just a matter of refining it all and piecing together the different applications.”

Since the researchers are working with the Defense Agency, they go out to a proving ground in the southwest every year to test their work. The team successfully tracked the movement of military vehicles during the November test.
With the advances in technology, and the virtual invisibility of these surveillance devices, privacy becomes more of an issue. When and where it is appropriate to use MEMS is a concern and will help guide its future applications.
“Having these things talk to each other aren’t really technical issues, they are more societal issues,” Beam said. “The privacy concerns are the kinds of limits right now.”