Smart Dust

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What Does Smart Dust Mean?

The term “smart dust” in IT refers to very small micro-electromechanical sensors (MEMS). Even though these individual components may be as small as the size of a grain of sand, or barely visible to the human eye, they can contain components such as circuits, sensors and wireless technologies, as well as individual power supplies.

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Techopedia Explains Smart Dust

Smart dust can sense vibrations and other physical phenomena in a space. These types of technologies, which are now generally in design stages, could be used in many different kinds of statistical analysis or information gathering. They would typically be a way to crowdsource large amounts of information to determine various statistical results.

In a practical sense, smart dust elements operate near or at the nanoscale, defined as 1 to 100 nm. Many experts refer to smart dust as a nanoscale project or as part of nanotechnology. As these types of projects move forward through some engineering challenges, they may have a huge impact on many industries in terms of automation and monitoring.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist
Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.