Expand Your Gaming Space with Sensors Proximity sensors and accelerometers are changing the gaming experience as we know it today. While these technologies are not new, improvements in user acceptance, size, performance, and price are spurring their use in the gaming market.

Is That Meat Okay to Eat? There's yet another food spoilage detector that can detect high levels of bacterial activity in poultry and other meats destined for the table. SensorfreshQ sniffs out biogenic amines that can be picked up by a handheld device that passes an air sample over the item of interest.

And Check the Silverware Too At Cornell University, researchers are working on a new table napkin made of nanofibers that can advise of the presence of microorganisms you don't want to ingest.

A Touch of Genius FingerTPS, a line of capacitive tactile pressure sensors mounted on stretchable fabric designed to be worn on a person's fingertips and palm, can measure the pressures exerted while the person uses a tool or performs some other action.

Playing the E-Field: Capacitance Sensors in Action When Michael Faraday introduced the concept of an electric field, little did he realize how far science would run with the idea. Today, engineers are using electric fields to sense the presence of other objects without relying on physical contact. Referred to as e-field sensors or capacitance sensors, they are becoming more and more prevalent in a wide range of inexpensive and long-lasting applications. When you take a closer look at how they work, you quickly see why their popularity is growing.

Apple and Nike Instrument Workouts Nike's new shoes incorporate sensors that communicate with Apple's iPod to display time, distance, and pace, as well as calories burned. Runners can review workout stats by run, or by week or month.

LBS Incorporates Sensors Cell phone providers promote location-based services (LBS) as a way to send custom messages to subscribers based on their location—as reported by GPS or radiolocation and triangulation. Now LBSs are beginning to incorporate sensors.

Magic Spectacles One problem with every type of eyeglasses, contact lenses, and even the plastic lenses implanted after cataract removal is that they all have a fixed focal length. Auto-focus cameras don't, but they operate on a principle that wouldn't work for a pair of spectacles. Until now.

Automotive Propels Consumer Sensors The silicon micromachined inertial sensor that deploys your automotive airbags can't simply be dropped into your laptop for free-fall detection without some do-differentlys. The differences go well beyond the application spaces of medium/high-g and low-g that automotive sockets sport. In fact, the automotive and consumer markets present conflicting fundamental demands. Building a bridge between them means giving reconsideration to design, test, space, quality, time-to-market, front- and back-end assembly—and price.

Biometrics Now and Then Fingerprint sensors are being improved and applied in new ways-and in the future will be combined with other technologies to enhance security.

MEMS Technology's True Potential Two recent market studies quantify the market for MEMS technology very differently. Both studies predict strong growth, but neither seems to touch on what I view as the true potential for microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) and micro-systems technology (MST).

Extending USB to Time-Critical Applications The technology can turn your PC into a highly deterministic distributed control platform.

ZigBee Ratification: Here We Grow In compliance with the time schedule established many months ago, the ZigBee Alliance (www.zigbee .org) has ratified the first ZigBee specification for wireless data communications. ZigBee is the only standards-based data communications protocol specifically designed to enable low-cost, low-power, wireless sensor networks. The spec finalization is the culmination of two years of worldwide development and interoperability testing by the more than 100 member companies within the ZigBee Alliance, and it promises to make wireless sensing and control networks a widespread reality. In fact, that ratification was the basis for rosy projections of wireless sensor growth that futurists and market researchers have made. For instance, ON World Inc.'s (www.onworld.com) projection of 465.58 million RF modules implemented for sensor networking by the year 2010 was based on the assumption of Q4 2004 ratification of the ZigBee spec. And by the way, ON World estimates that ZigBee-based modules will account for nearly 78% of..

How to Save Your Inductive Prox Sensor from a Hostile World Inductive proximity sensors are inexpensive, durable, and resistant to industrial contaminants. But if your sensor will be exposed to target impacts, abrasion, corrosive cutting compounds, and other abuse, you need to pay very close attention to which sensor you choose and how you mount it.