Embedded electronics will make everything more advanced
Imagine a few years from now you are walking to your car after a day at work. You check the latest text on your mobile device to discover a message telling you to buy milk, dog food, and dryer sheets. Was that a message from your wife?
No, it was from your refrigerator, cabinet, and dryer.
Embedded electronics is the idea of including an array of sensors, electronics and communications systems in every kind of device one can imagine. In the scenario above, these systems could include a shelf in a refrigerator designed to measure the weight of a gallon of milk and send a text message at a certain time if the weight drops below a certain threshold.
Embedded electronics are not just limited to appliances nor are they limited to useful functions. When combined with waterproof, flexible displays currently under development, they could allow for t-shirts that can have custom images uploaded into them. When combined with electrically active paint, they could allow someone to change the color of their car.
The most extreme examples of embedded electronics involve implanting those electronics in human beings. While this kind of technology is in its very early stages, it is not unimaginable for ideas like sub-dermal Bluetooth speakers and microphones to become a reality in the next decade. Implanted phones and media players could happen within the next twenty years.
What is the limit to embedded electronics? Frankly, there is none. As microprocessor technology moves closer to the nanotech level, the only thing that regulates what such technology can be used for is someone’s imagination.
Combined with a world connected by networks and wireless technologies, embedded electronics promise the potential for someone the ability to know everything about and to interact with everything they own and come in contact with.
Embedded electronics are for more than just commercial applications too. Government agencies could use such systems to actively monitor the quality of road surfaces or water supplies. Hospitals could use them to monitor the growth and spread of sickness causing pathogens.
Embedded systems are already hitting the market in their earliest forms, especially in the consumer appliance and automotive markets. These systems will become a flood in the next decade.
The question remains how we will manage all of the information we suddenly have from these systems.