The power of computers processing binary numbers in medical, manufacturing, environmental, and many other processes is dependent on being able to make biological, chemical, and physical measurements and convert the measurements to binary numbers. Increasingly with microminaturization these measuring devices are being placed in individual ICs.
Biological measurements include DNA testing. Chemical measurements include devices to measure the presence and amount of multitude of chemical molecules. Physical measurements include touch, pressure, temperature, acceleration and various electrical quantities.
Three human senses that are now being constructed on ICs are touch, taste and smell.
Touch screens are primarily for computers, but as computer and TV screens tend to merge it is certainly possible that you could have TV touch screens. From the perspective of binary numbers, a touch screen reacts to the specific location on the screen that was touched (1). Thus you have a 0-1 property.
To add touch to a computer screen you need four basic components.
One technology to create a touch screen is by adding a capacitive conductive coating to a clear glass sensor. Voltage is applied to the corners. When the screen is not in use the voltage is spread out into a uniform field. When the field is touched by a finger, the X-Y position is recognized by the disturbance in the field. A second technology is a resistive touchscreen which conducts electricity when touched and the position where touched can be calculated.
The use of touchscreens in point of sale, POS, devices can speed up the transaction process and reduce employee training time. People who are computer illiterate find touchscreens easier to use than keyboards. Touch screens are also better in locations where keyboards are inconvenient or will be damaged.
In our tongue we have four types of taste buds (sensors): sweet, sour, salt and bitter. We can distinguish numerous flavors because, for example, the sweet taste buds respond differently to different types of sweet molecules. Thus the pattern on the four types of sensors determines the taste (along with the aroma of the food?). The sensors in the tongue look like:
Thus to digitize taste, we need to create a device to measure the pattern of sweet, sour, salt, and bitter and digitize the measurements.
Electronic Taste
Smell is more complicated than taste in that we have millions of odor receptors of perhaps 10,000 different types. Dogs have more receptors and many more types. A diagram of the process of smell is:
These many receptors send signals to the brain where the pattern is recognized by the human neural network. Smells are learned through experience. We do not know the exact chemical composition of what we are smelling but recognize the pattern from previous experience.
Smell
What does this mean? The point is that transmission and manipulation
of data, words, voice, of pictures occurs through the use of binary
numbers. A general purpose communications network with multimedia
computers as nodes can manipulate and communicate numbers, words,
voice, and images. You don't need special purpose hardware for each
phenomenon. Also with the move to digital communication, the
communication engineer needs to know the number of bits he has to
transmit per second, but not what is being transmitted.
Fundamental Economic Point: It is much cheaper to have a single
computing and communication technology which will compute and
communicate numbers, text, symbols, voice and all types of images than
require separate technologies for each. In the marketplace, the
boundary line between communications and computer companies is becoming
fuzzy. Future competition in the combined computer-communications
industry will be fierce. One of the reasons for the breakup of the
phone system is AT&T's desire to penetrate the computer market. To
counter AT&T's move, IBM has entered the communications market.
Neither has had much success in the other's territory. The most
successful in this new world were the growth of firms to produce
routers for the internet such as Cisco.