In the future, there will be hundreds of billions of embedded chips and sensing devices integrated into everything from key chains and swimming pools to your apartment's walls and even your skin. All of these devices will be able to compute, sense and communicate with each other. ... "Computer chips will get smaller, more powerful, connected and 'pervasive.' They'll bring digital intelligence into all kinds of objects and spaces." Source: The Shape of Computer Chips to Come Tim McDonald, May 2002.

Smart dust devices are tiny wireless microelectromechanical sensors (MEMS) that can detect everything from light to vibrations. Thanks to recent breakthroughs in silicon and fabrication techniques, these "motes" could eventually be the size of a grain of sand, though each would contain sensors, computing circuits, bidirectional wireless communications technology and a power supply. Motes would gather scads of data, run computations and communicate that information using two-way band radio between motes at distances approaching 1,000 feet.
 

The new sensors will be able to detect vibration, chemicals, radiation, biological agents, explosives, footsteps, voices, still images, and even video images and transmit them to a network of fixed and mobile relay collection stations. The significant reduction in size will enable sensors to be deeply embedded in the physical world products or materials and spread throughout our environment like smart grains of sand. Currently, the sensor networks with communications capabilities have been produces that are as small as a penny. In the future NanoTechnology (the capability of building things one molecule at a time) will create miniature sensors so small they could be woven directly into the fabric of a chair or in the layers of plastic in a milk carton or maybe even within the ink on a piece of paper.

The multiple layers of networked sensors would consist of seven layers:

    Spaced Based Satellite Systems
    Airborne Based Combination Relay/Sensing Systems
    Elevated Land Based Sensors and Relay Systems
    Common Product Based Sensing Systems
    Ground based Sensors
    Sea Surface Sensing Systems
    Ocean Floor Sensor Systems

Just imagine sensors the size of sand graduals dropped from a plane that detect footsteps in a field or desert. Or sensors of similar size mixed into the asphalt on roads detecting traffic. These devices could be cloaked as bricks and detect footsteps or the movement of vehicles and record then forward the information. Source: GIS, Information Technology, and BioTech Take Center Stage in Supporting Homeland Security Kevin Coleman, April 2003.