Guest Editorial

Today, trends like the Internet of Things are nearing large-scale implementation. They rely on solutions enabling objects to become cyber-physical systems capable of perceiving their environment or their internal state. Sensing provides the information gateway to achieve this coupling between object and environment, as well as their interaction. This understanding has fuelled considerable research efforts on intelligent and sensor-equipped structures. Among the obstacles that impede their introduction are economic ones. Material rather than component-integrated sensing and intelligence has the potential to circumnavigate some of the obstacles by paving the way to economy-of-scale effects [1], [2]. Such concepts have been known for a considerable time [3]. This Special Issue on Material-Integrated Sensing, Data Processing and Communication is based on a Symposium held at the IEEE SENSORS 2012 Conference, Taipei, Taiwan, October 28–31, for which we defined our own vision of intelligent materials; perceptive matter, as we envisage it, must have the ability to gather data on its own state and environment, process this data and communicate the information derived internally or to a higher level system component. To do so, it must in itself be a complex system with sensing as basic functionality.