Sensory Engineering in the IoT Connected Society

Abstract

The progress of sensing engineering is remarkable, but most of them detect only particular signals. However, the Connected Society IoT is creating calls for holistic sensing. In traditional engineering, humans operated products/machines from outside. But in the IoT Connected Society, humans and products/machines work together in the same team, and tremendous number of things will be connected. Therefore, IoT calls for nonverbal communication. We need to remove the wall between living and nonliving things. And such a change will be accelerated more and more because the number of degrees of freedom of a system increases, and changes increase. Thus, in the IoT Connected Society, value is no more product-based, but it will be evaluated based on how flexibly and adequately we can adapt to the changing situations. Adaptability is replacing functions. To understand the changing situations of the outside world, we need holistic sensing because we cannot predict what will happen next. Base on the holistic sensing information, we can understand the current outside situation and we can estimate in what direction it will change. This paper points out that traditional Japanese culture did not distinguish the outside from the inside. The new material such as cellulose nanofiber is based on the same principle, so that such new materials is strongly expected to play the role of holistic sensors.