Smart, intelligent and cogent MEMS based sensors

The paper develops a terminology to describe sensors which have been enhanced in some way by the integration of some additional processing circuitry. Several terms, current in the literature, including 'smart sensors' and 'intelligent sensors' are discussed and the 'cogent sensor' is introduced. This is followed by a brief review of existing and potential applications of artificial intelligence (AI) to microsensors, in terms of technology integration, device level performance enhancement and system level added functionality. Examples of AI applications to the design of smart, intelligent and cogent microsystems include sensor data validation, correction and missing data restoration, sensor fault detection, intelligent actuation and information inference from sensor data. Hardware implementations of ANN to support the functions above are mentioned and the future of AI for sensors is discussed.