1.1 What Constitutes a Smart Technology?

The words intelligent and smart are often used as tools to market new products but sometimes this is done with little thought as to what this should mean. Some of these products may incorporate the highest of high technology but do they really possess an awareness of their situation? And are they then capable of reacting to it? These are the key attributes that a technology must exhibit for it to be considered a truly smart technology.

By situation we could mean the technology's environment, it's condition, or it's motion for example. The subsequent reaction could be to protect itself in some manner, instigate a repair to itself, or to adapt it's function so that it is tailored specifically to the situation.

Technologies with the ability to sense changes in their circumstances and execute measures to enhance their functionality under the new circumstances offer enormous benefits in performance, efficiency, operating costs and endurance.

1.2 Application of Smart Technologies

The breadth and depth of applications that could potentially gain an advantage from this concept, whether in medicine, engineering or physics, is vast. Each application will have many of it's own unique design criteria determined by the intended function but the creation of all smart technologies necessitates a solution to the same dilemma: how to integrate the fundamental abilities of awareness and reaction...