Biomedical electronics serving as physical environmental and emotional watchdogs

Over forty years of happy CMOS scaling brought the room-sized super-computer for the nerds into everyone\´s pocket, literally connecting every-body on earth. In an economy which is based on double digit growth, the obvious next step is to connect everything on earth. This move redirects the focus from electronics-for-infotainment to electronics helping to solve the mounting societal challenges our earth faces: better and more affordable health care for everyone, safer and more efficient transportation, cleaner and more sustainable environment. Realizing this requires abandoning the traditional keyboard/screen user interface to make the electronic devices autonomous, independent from a human in the loop, and to provide its services hidden in the background. In this paper, I will first explain why in the background operating electronics recently became feasible in the form of autonomous wireless sensor nodes. Next, I will present a technology roadmap, ranging from sensors measuring physical phenomena, via environmental sensors that combine physical with chemical monitoring, to ultimately emotional sensors that provide instantaneous and objective information about one\´s emotions. For those worrying about "big brother" possibilities, I will end the presentation with a concrete use case for psychiatric drug approval.