Sensors that smell help save lives everyday. From cars that won't start because court-ordered breathalyzers smell alcohol in the operator's blood stream, to bomb-sniffing machines at the airport, to complex medical tests that analyze your breath - we are designing machines that smell to make the world a safer place.
Smell sensors are essential to the future of the Internet of Things. From RFID stickers capable of smelling food through the package and updating the food's status to the Web, to our next phone being a "smell phone", engineers are finding innovative ways to help protect our families from being exposed to toxic hazards.
Breathalyzers
Sensors that measure blood alcohol content by smelling your breath have been around since 1938 when a professor named Rolla Harger invented the Drunkometer. His success in marketing the device was due in part to his work with the National Safety Council to legislate alcohol limits - as well as legitimize his sensor data as evidence in a court of law. Today, the innovation that's occurring with these sensors is the dramatic decline in cost. So next time you want to know if you're legal to drive after you drink, you can just blow into a Mini-Key chain Breathalyser, a device that will set you back less than $10.
Smell Sensors In Medicine
In Israel, Russell Berrie of the Nanotechnology Institute at Technion developed a sensor that can verify lung cancer by smelling a patient's breath. The sensor searches 42 different lung cancer biomarkers, and is built out of nine cross-reactive chemiresistors. These resistors are built out of gold nanoparticles, each with different organic functionalities. A similar sensor from the same institute can be used to detect kidney disease sooner than traditional urine tests can. The research for that particular sensor system is titled Sniffing Chronic Renal Failure in Rat Model by an Array of Random Networks of Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes.
Smell Phones
Michael Sailor, professor of chemistry and biochemistry at U.C. San Diego is working with startup Rhevision to develop a smelling device that will attach to your cell phone. The system is based on a camera that takes a picture of porous silicon. Each of these microscopic pores are individually shaped, or tuned, to change color when a specific chemical is encountered. Thanks to the current megapixel resolution of today's phone cameras you can take a single picture of these pores, or sensors, and load it to the Web where it can be analyzed in real time. One application would be that these smell phones could rapidly map out chemical spills and other exposure threats.
RFID That Smells
General Electric is currently testing RFID-configured smell sensors. These small stickers can not only detect the presence of hazardous waste, they can also detect and report food spoilage. One example is a milk carton with an RFID sticker attached to the outside. The sticker periodically smells the milk through the packaging, and as soon as the milk goes bad the RFID sends a wireless alert.
Bomb Smelling Sensors
Ion Mobility Spectrometry machines are currently the most common bomb-smelling sensors in U.S. airports. Austrian manufacturer Ionicon Analytik was recently featured in Scientific America because of its new Ionicon Analytik's Proton-Transfer-Reaction Mass Spectrometry (PTR-MS) machine. This machine is about the size of a refrigerator and is so sensitive that it can distinguish between molecules that are nearly identical. The device works by creating "protonated" water vapor, which is essentially water vapor with extra protons. Many organic compounds, including explosives, have an affinity to grab those extra protons and in turn become positive themselves.The positive ions produced can be extracted and analyzed to reveal their chemical composition.
Non-Destructive Carbon Dating
Traditional carbon dating methods required that a small piece of the object must be destroyed through burning. The carbon is then measured for age based on degeneration of the radioactive isotope Carbon 14. Yet with many artifacts the destruction of even small portions of it is sometimes prohibitive. A new non-destructive method allows the object to be placed a container that is filled with an electrically charged plasma gas similar to the plasma found in a high-definition TV. The plasma gently oxidizes the artifact, which will release trace amounts of carbon dioxide that can then be used for Carbon14-decay analysis.
These six ways are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what's currently being developed. For example, perspective search service GlobalSpec lists thousands of companies designing gas and chemical sensors. How many of these sensors will one day generate data for the Web? If you have a sense of scenarios that will make this happen, please post your comments below.
Some cool visualisations of RFID fields. Would be amazing if this could be done in real time, in-situ where the readers are installed. Could really make swiping that card a lot more engaging...
Mobile tricks aren't just for kids anymore - a lesson designer toy retailer KidRobot is teaching marketers.
In a New York City-based promotion its Dunny collection of toys, the company has launched a massive, 5-day scavenger hunt for grown ups, who play to gain clues to a hidden QR code featured on a single poster somewhere in the city. Find it and scan it to win prizes.
Clues are meted out via Twitter, the KidRobot newsletter and at KidRobot stores now through Friday, and the official rules site offers links to QR code scanners. The campaign, from We Are Plus, seems ideal for a single city, though it's hard to imagine many people spanning out across Manhattan in search of the poster unless there's a really great prize.
But it is a nice use of both the mobile medium as a promotional vehicle and QR codes.
And it does seem perfect for a designer toy store looking for some uptown-downtown-and-cross-town cool.
It's that time of year when fashion houses come out with fall fashion "look-books" that showcase their lineup of clothing, collectibles and accessories. One firm, Kidrobot, with stores in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Miami and Dallas, and global distribution, is using a different approach to promote its designer toys.
The small New York firm is using a digital idea that is big in Japan to get people engaged in a lighthearted way with the Kidrobot brand: QR codes.
The QR (quick read), two-dimensional matrix, the most popular code in Japan, was used initially for tracking vehicle parts in manufacture. With the advent of smartphones, it is used widely in Japan for mobile tagging, wherein Japanese consumers take a snapshot of the Mondrian/ chessboard-like codes to go to a URL, for instance, get product or retail information or coupons and pricing info.
The codes are central to Kidrobot's five-day scavenger hunt in New York City called "Dunny Hunt." The effort, via New York-based We Are Plus and promoting Kidrobot's 2009 Dunny Series of toys, requires participants to use their smartphones to scan QR codes on Kidrobot promotional items hidden around town.
The company, whose products sell in over a thousand stores around the world, is using the New York program as a test, and plans to roll it out in the four other cities in which it has stores -- and perhaps elsewhere. "This is version 1.0," says Paul Budnitz, principal of Kidrobot.
Kidrobot's newsletter subscribers, community members, Manhattan store shoppers and Twitter feed followers can opt-in for daily clues that lead them to a Kidrobot promotional display (posters, postcards, stickers and/or t-shirts).
People who find the codes and scan them add one of a series of virtual Dunny toys to their digital "collection." They also become eligible for prizes, including rewards for the first person to scan the QR Code from that day's hidden item. The grand prize is a full set of the Dunny Series 2009 designer toys.
To play, participants get a link to a free smartphone application for scanning the QR bar codes in the hidden promotional displays. Posters will go up near the main store on Prince Street on Saturday.
Budnitz says that while the digital scavenger hunt is new, "we do all kinds of interesting events, like scavenger hunts around limited-edition toys, all the time. We have had [launches] where you could only buy the toy at a Chinese restaurant downtown or one where they had to send in a 'junk food' photo of themselves to buy a toy."
He says the QR codes are ideal because they can be put anywhere, "on stickers, t-shirts, billboards -- they can be photocopied on sheets of paper, we can put them on the back of peddie cabs, so they will be all over the city on different places."
Budnitz says thousands are likely to participate based on interest in the company's products. "When we offer new toys, we will have a line of four or five hundred people just waiting to buy it at one store."
Principal Jeremy Hollister and co-creative director Judy Wellfare at We Are Plus got the idea after spending time in Japan. "This technology has been used in Japan for some time, but it's still relatively new here in America," says Hollister. "Creating a nice-looking, mobile-optimized Web site that functions properly was the biggest challenge."
In 2019, when you look back at the social media landscape ten years earlier, you might laugh at how hard you had to work. You had to type things into forms (ha! remember those?), type URLs in the address bar (how archaic!), and put up with irritating communications about irrelevant products. Social media in the future will be effortless and everywhere. Here’s a look at some of the new technologies in store for us over the next 10 years that will make our social (media) lives easier.
1. The Arduino – One Tough Little Italian
Arduino is a small circuit board commonly used to prototype electronics. Its low cost and ease of implementation has meant that this little device is now leading a hobbyist revolution in connecting real life objects to social networks, like Twitter (). It has allowed one man to create a device attached to a chair that tweets at the presence of noxious natural gasses (ahem), another uses Arduino to monitor when his cats are inside the house or out, and a small bakery and cafe in East London is now able to tweet what’s fresh from their oven. This may all seem like pretty pointless stuff, but the pointlessness is the point.
The revolution of objects notifying human beings of their state (e.g., The Internet of Things) isn’t happening in the R&D labs of large multinational conglomerates, it’s happening in the spare rooms, garages and bedrooms of developers. The printing press, possibly one of the first inventions to aid information sharing, was invented by Johannes Gutenberg with investment intended for an altogether different enterprise: polished metal mirrors intended to capture holy light from religious relics, presumably to sell to hapless tourists. In other words, what might seem like silly tinkering today, might be a key contributor to our future world.
2. RFID Tags & Transponders
While Arduino will help household items become involved in our social media world, transponders such as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags are truly breathing life into our objects.
For a number of years RFID tags have been used in passports, ID cards, travel cards and credit cards as a means to identify us when scanned, and they are used commercially for inventory tracking. Brands including Abercrombie & Fitch, Levis and Kleenex have experimented with RFID tags to track their inventory at an item-level. Transponders can be made as small as a grain of sand and can be produced very cheaply. So it is widely thought that they may one day be installed in everything from a packet of biscuits to a pair of underpants.
But RFID tags have potentially valuable real-world applications. It may be possible, for example, to create a very cheap device which sits in your trash can or recycling box and monitors the contents by scanning RFID tags as stuff is thrown in. You might ask why anyone would want to do this with their garbage, but there is a lot of valuable data to be had in what is, in essence, scrobbling for your trash. Your trash is a goldmine of consumption data in the same way that your search data or browsing history is, and could be used to track brand loyalty and consumption habits.
And mobile phone manufacturers, particularly Nokia, are currently experimenting with consumer devices that act as readers and scanners, meaning that your mobile device might be able to do things like exchange information with other phones by bringing them near to one another, or gather information directly from products and find out instantly if anyone in your network has purchased the item in the past. Within the context of mobile phones, this technology is generally referred to as NFC (Near-Field Communication).
Of course, just because we could do this, doesn’t necessarily mean we would, or should. There are clear privacy implications involved that might make the idea of monitoring consumption via your trash or tracking your underpants dead on arrival. Privacy advocates such as CASPIAN are highly motivated to prevent this from happening — the notion that RFIDs could be on our person without us knowing is akin to web sites sharing knowledge about us without our consent. The anti-RFID site spychips.org has more information about the privacy concerns of the technology.
3. Geomagnetic Sensors in Mobile Devices
The compass is hardly new — it’s been around for thousands of years — but Yamaha has created a tiny 2mm x 2mm chip intended for use in mobile phones as a compass. When used in conjunction with GPS, AGPS or Wi-Fi triangulation and an accelerometer a compass heading could be extremely useful to give more granular positioning data to mobile applications.
Some older phones used to come equipped with these compasses, and though they have been phased out in recent years, they’re starting to make a comeback. Apple Insider suggests that the next generation of iPhone hardware will contain a “Magnetometer,” the feature already exists in the HTC Dream (the T-Mobile G1), though it is currently used for very little.
But the real world applications are many. For example, let’s say that you’ve just come out of a subway at a roundabout, and the first thing you do is take out your GPS-enabled phone’s mapping application to see where you need to walk to get to your friends waiting for you at a bar. In order to orientate yourself correctly, you’ll need to find street names. But if you happen to be in London, where I live, you know that street names are rarely in convenient places, they’re usually hidden behind trees and other signs (where’s the fun otherwise?). So a compass heading is a perfect way to let you know which direction you roughly need to walk in. Likewise, if you want to scan an area at a certain location for a great place to eat, your device is going to need a heading in order to overlay information over the top of your screen.
Imagine you’re on your way to a conference and you have a couple of hours to kill so you park yourself in the corner of a local bar to catch up on Mashable (). You’ve barely begun reading when an attractive girl or guy catches your eye. You’re transfixed, your heart starts to race — you’re in love. But being the shy type you can’t just go over and introduce yourself, so instead you do a quick scan of the room with your cell phone to pick up any latent metadata. Unfortunately, a social network profile pops up informing you that the object of your affection is in a relationship. Your initial excitement rapidly dissipates and you get on with your reading.
That scenario is pretty far-fetched, but it’s one potential promise of Biometric Face Recognition technology that is already used by police and security services to help identify known criminals. 3 years ago Google acquired Neven Vision, a company that provides such technology. Google reported that it is using this technology in its Picasa product to help keep your personal photos organized without you needing to do any of the actual organizing. I have literally thousands of pictures of my children and family on my computer at home. It would take me days to go through and tag each one so that I could search them more easily in the future. But at some point, Picasa might be able to tag everything for me automatically by recognizing faces and objects in my photos.
That’s still not quite to the level of our hypothetical, but Tochindot’s Sekai Camera and Wikitude are making in-roads into rich and immersive ambient metadata, too. Their current goals revolve around tagging inanimate objects, but someday biometric face recognition could be used to attach metadata to real people.
5. OpenID, OAuth, and the Identity Graph
Having to remember passwords for multiple accounts can be frustrating, and answering the same questions over and over on registration forms becomes tedious. Ten years from now, filling out our information once and then easily transferring it from place to place might be commonplace.
OpenID is an open authentication protocol that lets users use a single set of login credentials for every site they visit. It’s already in use at hundreds of smaller websites and large sites like Facebook () are starting to accept OpenID accounts. Once you’ve authenticated, a second open protocol called OAuth will help you share data about yourself with other sites you use. OAuth lets your grant authorization to sites to collect data from other places you participate online, which ultimately could eliminate the need to fill in redundant information about your profile and who your friends are at each new site you use. And companies like Cliqset and DandyID are creating platforms that will allow you to share your entire identity graph information from your profile to your contacts to your lifestream.
Together, these technologies could essentially eliminate the need to fill out forms and register for sites all together.
6. Mind Reading
My favorite scene from Back to The Future 2 is one in which Marty visits a 1980s-theme cafe where he sees some kids looking at his old favorite arcade game. Marty tells them he’s a “crack shot” but when he demonstrates the interface, the kids complain, “You have to use your hands!? That’s like a baby’s toy.” Classic.
But the idea of being able to control an interface without the use of your fine motor skills has massive implications for human computer interaction. Consider the ability to tweet what you’re thinking without having to pull your phone out of your pocket, type your message and hit send. Imagine being able to think ‘Facebook’ and your screen presents you with an overview of your friend’s activity stream. This method of interaction is at a very experimental stage but there areproofs-of-concept that exist. Most of this kind of innovation is currently intended to help people with limited motor skills, and not lazy social media addicts, however.
7. Natural Language Processing
Like Optical Pattern Recognition, Natural Language Processing (NLP) seeks to automatically categorize and understand that which humans understand with ease. By doing so, computers will be able to understand the requests and needs of their human users far better. Of course, talented programmers can already tell their computer to do things with ease, but the rest of us would benefit from applications that understand our curious ways of speaking.
Firefox’s Ubiquity is one project that’s attempting to change the way we interact with the web by allowing people to use natural language commands. Further, in the future, applications might exist that could analyze your tweets or comments with NLP, and suggest people or brands for you to follow.
The Future
Many of the technologies explored in this post are in their infancy, but they could have a profound effect on how we use the Internet and social media in the future. If you know of any other technologies that you feel might advance the future social media landscape please mention them in the comments.
Mike Laurie works as a Digital Planner at UK Integrated Agency JPMH where he helps brands such as BlackBerry, Nestlé, Johnson & Johnson, and Hasbro get the most from digital media. You can follow Mike on Twitter.
Bicycle usage is up around the world - and with increased amounts of bikes come increased instances of bike thefts. Copenhagen residents alone had 20,000 bicycles stolen last year. Three initiatives from around the globe are aiming to combat and prevent bike theft using RFID (radio frequency ID) tags.
The University of Portsmouth in the UK has begun embedding RFID tags on bikes registered in their WASP (Wireless Asset Security Protection) program. Students can park their bikes in designated safe zones and register their position via mobile phone. If their bike is moved without calling and entering a pin code, cctv cameras will zoom in on the area to see if anything is amiss. Oregon State University takes a similar approach, “bugging” participating student’s bikes with RFID tags. It’s used mostly as a bike recovery and theft deterrent method and the bugs are free to OSU students. And finally, the city of Copenhagen is working with the Danish Technical Institute to create a better chip to help locate some of the city’s many stolen bikes.
Want to track Fido using GPS? Frame a new photo for grandma in real time?
AT&T has created a new division within the company to help devise new consumer devices – digital cameras, devices for cars, even dog collars – which they hope will make it easy to access the Web using AT&T’s network.
The idea behind the new initiative, said Glenn Lurie, president of the new emerging devices division, is to quench consumers’ desire for access to the Internet at any time or place. Because nearly 9 out of 10 people already own a mobile phone, AT&T can’t grow fast enough by selling more phones. It needs to find new sources of revenue, particularly devices that use data. Industry analysts suggest that the market for new Web-enabled devices will grow faster than cell phones in the next ten years.
Mr. Lurie said AT&T has dedicated more than 50 people to the division and is negotiating with potential partners. But he already has a few ideas in mind. “Everyone loves their pets,” said Mr. Lurie. So much so, AT&T is interested in a developing a Web-enabled animal collar. If a dog comes up missing, an owner can go to a Web site and, using AT&T’s network, find where their dog has wandered.
Mr. Lurie said too that he saw in-car entertainment as a market for such devices. For example, instead of popping a DVD into a car player, movie watchers in the backseat could access the Web on a screen, buy a movie from iTunes and watch it right away.
Mr. Lurie also mentioned a Web-enabled digital camera that could send photos in real-time to a specially designed Web-enabled picture frame. Of course both products would have to be compatible so photos could be transmitted via AT&T’s network. That’s no small feat given all the partners involved. But Mr. Lurie said it was technologically possible.
“We wouldn’t put this level of commitment to it if we did not think it was possible,” Mr. Lurie said of the initiative.
AT&T does not plan on making the devices themselves. And the hard part will be getting the makers of cameras, cars and dog collars to agree to put chips in their products dedicated to accessing AT&T’s network. (Verizon Wireless uses a different network.) And even the simplest of devices could be months or years away. Mr. Lurie, though, said he hoped to make some announcements about partners or new products in the first quarter of next year.
In light of the RFID tag research I have been doing, I couldn't pass putting this up.
Featured in article from Zdnet former Telstra boss Phil Burgess suggested a new use for RFID.
".... I said, you know what we ought to do, is do that with pollies. As soon as you get elected you get one of these little RFID tags in your ear. You have all the promises you know, and maybe every Christmas you say: did you keep your promise or didn't you keep your promise, decide if they get coal in their sock or not," he said.
Full article: http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/communications/soa/Politicians-need-to-be-RFID-tagged-Burgess/0,130061791,339291911,00.htm?omnRef=http://www.google.com.au/ig?hl=en
Digital Screens Could Adjust Messages Based on Features
Ad targeting is coming to a store near you.
In the latest effort to tailor ads to specific consumers, marketers are starting to personalize in-store promotions based on products the consumer recently picked off a shelf or purchased -- and in the near future, based on what the shopper looks like.
Dunkin' Donuts is among the first marketers in the U.S. to begin testing the technologies, at two locations in Buffalo, N.Y. People ordering a coffee in the morning can see ads at the cash register promoting the chain's hash browns or breakfast sandwiches. At the pick-up counter, customers see ads prompting them to return for a coffee break in the afternoon and try an oven-toasted pizza.
YCD Multimedia
Dunkin' Donuts is among the retailers tailoring ads to consumers on in-store digital screens based on items that the customers have purchased.
In a separate test, Procter & Gamble is placing radio-frequency identification tags on products at a Metro Extra retail store in Germany so that when a customer pulls the product off the shelf, a digital screen at eye level changes its message. When a consumer picks out a shampoo for a particular type of hair, for instance, the screen recommends the most appropriate conditioner or other hair products, says John Paulson, president of G2 Interactive, a digital-marketing arm of WPP Group's G2 Network.
This comes as advertisers are spending more of their ad dollars on in-store marketing. Audience fragmentation and the waning power of television ads are forcing marketers to make their pitches and tout their brands when and where consumers are closer to making a purchase: in the store.
Most of the experimentation by marketers is being done with the new digital screens that are appearing next to cash registers and in store aisles. Because cameras are embedded in many of these digital screens displaying the ads, marketers are hoping to serve up ads based on the consumer's appearance.
Many of the in-store targeted-advertising efforts are still in the early stages of development. Marketing executives say that much research still needs to be done to evaluate the best types of ads to display and the way consumers respond to messages. Some fear that the proliferation of screens makes it more likely that they will be ignored.
"I'm a skeptic on technology in the shopping environment," says Andy Murray, chief executive of Saatchi & Saatchi X, the Publicis Groupe agency that focuses on in-store marketing. Screens need to be useful to get people to pay attention, and if stores are just using them to sell products, shoppers won't be receptive, he says.
The company powering the screens for Dunkin', YCD Multimedia, is in the midst of deploying facial-recognition technologies that can classify people into certain demographic groups by identifying their approximate age and their sex.
Companies in the securities industries have been experimenting with facial-recognition technologies for some time. The technology often works by capturing an image of a person and using sophisticated algorithms to analyze features like the size and shape of the nose, eyes, cheekbones and jaw line -- against databases of face information. At the 2001 Super Bowl in Tampa Bay, Fla., for instance, security officials used facial-recognition technologies to scan for terrorists and known criminals.
Only recently has the price for digital screens dropped enough that retailers could afford to put the screens in stores. Even now, the digital signs operate on a delay in some places, so that marketers have to program their commercials days in advance -- which rules out changing the ads on the fly, based on the characteristics of a given the shopper.
At the 1,400 eight- and nine-foot-tall plasma screens in 105 malls across the U.S. operated by Adspace Networks, there is roughly a two-hour delay between the time an ad is downloaded and its appearance on the screens. In some cases, these ads have achieved their mission of spurring sales too well. When inventories of the advertised products have become depleted, the ads haven't changed to reflect that reality. "One of the issues we have is that we run out of stock," says Adspace Chief Executive Dominick Porco.
New technologies are helping some marketers address that problem. Aroma Espresso Bar, an Israeli café chain that also operates stores in New York and Canada, is testing YCD systems that automatically change the ads people see at the cash register as a way of managing inventory better. If there is a large amount of pastries that will go stale that night, for instance, a manager will switch ads on the screen to promote them, says Gali Goldwaser, marketing manager for Aroma.
Technology firms hope to ward off any potential privacy issues by not capturing and storing any personally identifiable information about consumers.
Here's a few very digital developments from a space that would be last on most people's list of where to look for digital innovation: the supermarket.
Asda & Orange in the UK provide an excellent example of looking at digital 'beyond the banner'. Using a bit of knowledge about your customers, some great technology and an understanding of the branded service as an ideal digital marketing approach come together to create what looks like a great way to get the blokes out shopping. Now how can they tie in involvement from the wives and girlfriends? See the articles from Brand Republic and PSKF
Looking past the trolley to the supermarket itself as an interactive space, check out German's Metro Group future store : http://www.future-store.org
A great place to check out the latest in RFID innovation and keep your finger on the pulse of all things digital in retail
Mike Laurie works as a Digital Planner at 
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