Highlights of Sensors Converge 2023

This year, Sensors Converge will be held at the Santa Clara (California) Convention Center from Tuesday June 20 – Thursday June 22.

The conference will begin with a series of pre-conference workshops on Tuesday. They range over a variety of topics that are significant for the current and future state of sensing systems. Some highlights include:

• Extending Battery Life to Empower the IoT/IIoT (Tuesday 9AM to 12PM) A half-day workshop about the critical issue of extending battery life. The use of sensor systems is steadily expanding, not only for new applications, but the sensors are more broadly deployed with a single system. And most of this growth involves battery-powered “smart” sensors. Therefore, the goal is to extend battery life as long as possible with energy harvesting, intelligent power management, advancements in semiconductors/MEMS, low-power wireless communications, energy storage, and test/validation to optimize energy efficiency, utilization, and therefore battery life.

• The Smarts Behind Smart Cities and Smart Farms using Sensors in IoT (Tuesday 9AM to 12PM) Local governments are starting to understand that they can run their cities more efficiently and more safely by utilizing the IoT.

  It seems that every day there are new IoT applications in agriculture, from detailed geographical monitoring of a variety of soil conditions to monitoring the health of crops and livestock.

• Printed, Flexible, and Stretchable and Functional/E-Fabric Sensors and Sensor-Based Systems: Technology Launchpads to Enable Emerging Applications (Tuesday 9AM to 3PM) There has been an exponential growth in the field of flexible, printed, and organic large-area electronics and sensors driven by applications including health and activity monitoring in wearables for e-Health, sports/recreational and military.

  The expansion of telehealth services that enable medical providers to use remote monitoring for gathering health data from smart sensors, can be attributed to a couple of factors. Most recently, with COVID-19, more and more healthcare is provided remotely. But even before that, as the proportion of older people has been growing, there has been a movement to age-at-home, rather than in a nursing facility. Remote health monitoring is key to making that possible.

Leaders’ Roundtable — State of the Industry: The New Era of Sensors (Wednesday 8:30 to 9:15)

During this roundtable discussion, top industry leaders will give a snapshot of the state of the sensor and microchip industry, the most impactful enabling technologies. They will talk through the key roadblocks that linger relating to standardization, cost, size, and power demand.

Smart Sensor and Actuator Standards and Interoperability for IoT, IIoT & CPS (Wednesday 9:25 to 9:45)

Dr. Eugene Song, of the national Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will discuss the interoperability standards without which the IoT and IIoT could not exist. He will focus on a suite of distributed architecture-based smart transducer interface standards for sensors and actuators, designated as IEEE 1451.

Keynote Address (Wednesday 11:00 to 11:20)

The first of two keynotes will be given by Elena Fersman PhD, VP, Head of Global AI Accelerator, Ericsson, and Adjunct Professor of Cyber-Physical Systems at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. She will discuss how artificial intelligence can be used to optimize the performance of cyber-physical systems while guaranteeing their mission-critical properties.

The session at 2:20 PM on Wednesday addresses what I consider to be a critical question:

The Need for more Sensors vs. the Need for New Approaches with the Sensor Data We Have

The amount of data generated by a large sensor system over a short timeframe can be quite large, into the gigabytes and terabytes. By using whole data logs and multivariate machine learning, it is possible to expose data and trends about underlying hardware and manufacturing processes that were not originally envisioned when the sensor system was created.

—Ed Brown, editor, Sensor Technology