Empowering Phones to Feel, See, and Smell

 July 11, 2011, IMEC technology forum, San Francisco—Jo De Boeck, senior vice president for smart systems and energy technology at IEMC talked about future phone features. What does your phone know about you now? It knows your location, calendar, contacts, and communications threads.

Would you like your phone to care about you? With new sensors and algorithms, the phone could sense and identify these things about you: diet, safety, stress, fitness, security, emotions, food quality, social contact, changing habits, health condition, counterfeit warning, therapy compliance, environmental threats. Interoperable coaching devices are evolving and adding new features all the time.

Now a regular bathroom scale can take your blood pressure while weighing you. Many other combinations of measuring and coaching devices are coming into the market. The next challenge is to make these separate devices interoperable, which will require the devices communicate with you and the environment. Soon these devices will be everywhere and will fit into your individual life scenario. The best platform for all the data will be the smart phone, because it is always available and offers the easiest path to full connectivity.

Sensors already exist for smell. The base technologies include electro-chemical sensors which target specific compounds and nano sensors with surface properties that capture chemical compounds. Upon capture, the mass sensitive devices change some parameter such as deflection or spring rate as an output. Researchers have found that compounds available in fingerprints are related to your health, the environment, and various other applications.

Sensors can infer emotion through measurements of EEG, EKG, temperature, and respiration rate. It’s possible to construct sensors to make them comfortable and therefore wanted by consumers. The ability to integrate digital computing and RF links makes these integrated sensors easily achievable. The high levels of immigration permit many form factors.

For example, smart bandages could integrate sensors, computers, and radio links into a flexible substrate. In this way, medical people can monitor the healing progress. One issue for all of these devices is calibration. These sensors are meant to be in consumers hands and possibly disposable. As a result, developers have to live with drift by tracking changes over time on the cloud. Internally, the sensors can have an auto calibration cycle as part of their normal operations.

This plethora of sensors needs to be reliable enough, even though they may be disposable. Heterogeneous systems of sensors must be removable and replaceable by consumers without special tools or knowledge. The data from the sensors can be displayed as visual images or movies resulting in an extended hyperspectral information set.

Digital optics are improving rapidly and now have the resolution necessary to perform optical inspections. The challenges are to improve frame rates and resolution while reducing costs from the thousands of dollars per sensor to under $100. Fully Digital optics can use active lenses with MEMs actuators, or can use passive diffractive optics to capture a light field which is post-processed to display different resolutions or areas of focus.

Although there has been great progress in many areas, there is a need for more than just MEMS and sensor platforms. Nano-photonics, power and high voltage, bio-interfaces and other semiconductor processes will be necessary to realize the smart phone that can care about you.