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Science 18 October 1985:
Vol. 230. no. 4723, pp. 286 - 291
DOI: 10.1126/science.230.4723.286
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Articles

Instrumentation in the Next Decade

Tomas Hirschfeld 1

1 Senior scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, California 94550

The progress of instrumentation and measurement science in the next decade will be marked by three major trends. First, as the average instrument achieves a rather considerable level of intelligence, "dumb" systems will become the exception, and we will eventually begin to become proficient in exploiting the resulting capabilities. Second, more sophisticated understanding of measurement science and of actual measurement needs will drive instrumentation design advances such as miniaturized sensors and yet more "hyphenated" instruments and "mapping" instruments. Third, the combination of sensor-based instrumentation and microminiaturization will make possible distributed measurement by allowing point-of-use measurements by nonexperts.

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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)