“Smart Living Technology” has become an emerging technology to promote human well-being from both academic and industrial points of views. As a consequence, the technologies of autonomous networks of things have been proposed and developed. To address the smartness in internet-of-thing (IoT) systems, one of the fundamental requirements is “feel what human feels.” Since a human-feel world is composed by both physical and chemical cues, it is important for IoT to response to both of them.

In traditional, physical-sensing, such as acceleration, pressure, and acoustics, has been achieved by MEMS technologies for decays. These physical MEMS sensors offer low-power, low-cost, and high sensitivity measurements for various systems and promote blooming developments of smart-mobile platforms. On the contrary, chemical-sensing is still focusing at sensitivity/selectivity and limited at single-point measurements because of its high-price and high-power consumption. This impedes the development of smart things for smart living technologies. To meet this unmet need, MEMS technologies have been attracted in developing micro chemical sensors for years. Since the network concept is rarely considered in sensor device design, most micro chemical sensor research works are targeting single sensor characteristics, such as sensitivity and selectivity. In IoT applications, however, not only single-sensor characteristics but also the performance of a sensor system within networks should be addressed. In other words, the sensor-design paradigm will be changed by harnessing the networking capabilities to achieve collaborative sensing.

In this talk, the sensor-design paradigm shift based on IoT is introduced. Based on this concept, several micro chemical sensors with potentials to be integrated into IoT are also presented. In summary, MEMS technologies play an important role to establish smart devices for smart systems. This will be an emerging dimension to be developed in IoT system.