Sensing 101

Today decision-making in all fields demands more and more environmental data, enabling estimates improvement, fine-control of manufacturing processes, and aggregation of more value to services. Scientific research currently also depends on accurate data for testing new hypotheses and discovering new phenomena. In other words, all these fields require a complete infrastructure for automatically sensing, storing, and transmitting data. State-of-the-art Information and Communications Technology (ICT) offers an array of options for environment sensing, from high-resolution sensors to low-cost alternatives. The main objective of this chapter is to introduce the reader to the field of physical world sensing through sensors and dataloggers, which are the cornerstones of current ICT applications. We provide a big picture of the area, presenting: basic concepts on sensing and embedded systems, aspects of sensors technologies and features, the wide range of interfaces that compose current dataloggers, and finally, we end the chapter discussing future directions in the field.