Quantify Technology, page-12

"Panorama Synergy has developed an optical readout system for MEMS (microelectromechanical systems), which are expected to be huge in the future. These tiny machines could completely transform some areas such as medicine, where MEMS can be highly sensitive such as picking up traces of lung cancer on your breath. Panorama’s LumiMEMS reader could play a big part".

By 2030, as many as 100 trillion, or 100,000 billion, sensing devices could be connected to the internet in what’s called the Internet of Things. They would be able to sense everything from explosive conditions in mines to specific drugs at airports, as well as identify individual viruses in your work environment, determine your blood sugar level and even read the mood of an audience you are addressing — in real time.

These new sophisticated sensors will know when a machine component is about to wear out and accurately gauge whether a supermarket chicken really needs extra freezing, or whether the level of troponin in your blood could induce a heart attack.

It is estimated that the Internet of Things could be worth $19 trillion by 2020, more than 20 per cent of the global gross domestic product. Sensor technology is already an $86 billion global market, with the MEMS industry tipped to be worth $14 billion a year worldwide.

We’ve all been exposed to the existing crop of sensors: weather sensors, gyroscopes and accelerometers in phones, chemical sensors, pressure sensors, air quality sensors, fingerprint and heart rate sensors. But sensors are in the process of taking a quantum leap.