These kind of things would be really great for science labs also.<p>Let say you're doing some medical research, growing some cell cultures and you add some compounds to the cell cultures to see what happens. Then something weird happened to some of the cell cultures, and you don't know exactly what caused it. Perhaps that thing was really an important scientific discovery waiting to happen, but you missed it, because you didn't have all the data.<p>The process is normally recorded with a lab diary, where you write down everything deemed important. The problem is, you're not going to notice everything, and there is also a lot of things that you can't see without more sensors that just your eyes.<p>The system Bret describes here is basically an automated lab diary. With enough sensors it could record much more data, much more accurately than a person, and it has a way to query the actual data rather than having to either manually browse through pages of text or searching through it with just a basic full-text search engine.<p>A problem with many scientific experiments is that you might a lot of measuring equipment and sensors for the thing you are doing an experiment on, but you don't have the same thing for the experiment itself, to easily be able to debug the process and to see where something went right or wrong. Why was one lab able to reproduce an experiment, but another couldn't? This kind of questions can be very difficult and time consuming to answer.