As the only functional device for data acquisition, sensors are known as the "mother of data". Driven by the wave of AI, intelligent sensors have become one of the core technologies and products in the era of Internet of Things and intelligence. Facing new trends, how can China's sensor industry break through a series of challenges and reach higher levels? At the 7th Intelligent Sensor Industry Development Conference held recently, numerous industry experts and entrepreneurs discussed this topic.

The AI era calls for 'new sensing thinking'

In recent years, with the continuous emergence of new applications and products, the global sensor market has continued to expand, and related technologies and products are widely used, playing an increasingly important role in fields such as intelligent transportation, smart homes, smart logistics, smart hospitals, smart agriculture, industrial monitoring, and biomedicine. According to data from CCID Consulting, the global sensor market is expected to reach $208.59 billion in 2024, a year-on-year increase of 8.1%, and is projected to reach $227.15 billion by 2025.

From the perspective of industry trends, sensor innovation is developing towards intelligent directions such as system integration, modularization, and multi parameter fusion. Guo Yuansheng, Executive Vice Chairman of the China Sensor and IoT Industry Alliance, stated that with the comprehensive development of new materials, new processes, and new technologies, multiple sensitive components can be combined into one, along with processing circuits and algorithm software, to form a multidimensional indicator testing and multi parameter fusion microsystem module, achieving multifunctionality, miniaturization, digitization, systematization, networking, and intelligence. This will enable sensor technology to develop from a single object type to a multi-functional, multi parameter combination and integration of multiple technologies, expanding the scope of product use.

Industry experts emphasize that in the current global technological and industrial transformation triggered by artificial intelligence technology, the industry urgently needs to form a new consensus on the sensor industry, and form a repositioning and re understanding of the industry.

In the new era of intelligence and digitization, intelligent sensors are driving terminal innovation, becoming an important part of building a hardware ecosystem and empowering scenario and value innovation in numerous application fields. In this process, the development of the sensor industry needs to break away from traditional path dependence.

Don't use traditional industrial logic to build a sensor system, "said Liu Jianwei, Chairman of Shenzhen Hetai Intelligent Control Co., Ltd. If the understanding of sensors still stays at the point that they are only components, parts or whole machine components produced in the industrial era, then the development of the industry and enterprises will be limited.

For the sensor industry, sensing, control, modeling, scenarios, operations, ecology, etc. are all key elements, and the industry needs to support the development of the entire system by jointly building these basic frameworks.

For practitioners, it is necessary to establish a new mindset for sensors: firstly, a big service mindset, which is a value creation mindset that starts with the end. The second is new digital intelligence thinking. We must jump out of industrial thinking, business thinking, information thinking and traditional Internet thinking, and resolutely avoid "wearing new shoes to follow the old path". The third is the holistic ecological thinking, which integrates all elements, knowledge, abilities, and methods of society across time, space, and scene, providing personalized, real-time, accurate, and proactive services for people and families in all aspects.