Distributed sensing processing systems

A distributed sensor system, comprising:

• an external memory;
• and
• a plurality of smart sensors, each of the plurality of smart sensor comprising:
• a plurality of analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) configured to receive analog signals from a sensor module;
• a plurality of channel modules, each channel module connected to a respective ADC, each channel module comprising a limited data processing module configured to provide initial processing;
• a data control module operatively connected to each of the plurality of channel modules and configured to select a selected channel of the plurality of channels to receive initially processed data from the limited data processing module of the selected channel, the data control module configured to interface with the external memory to store data to the external memory and/or to read data from the external memory;
• and
• a batch processing module operatively connected to the data control module and configured to receive the initially processed data of the selected channel from the data control module to provide further processing of the initially processed data.

A method of performing resource intensive processing on multiple channels of data, comprising:

• initially processing data from a plurality of analog-to-digital converter (ADC) in real time in a plurality of channels as the data is made available by each ADC, wherein initially processing includes only partially processing the data from each ADC;
• cycling the initially processed data from each channel to a batch processing module through a data handler;
• and
• further processing the initially processed data at the batch processing module using more resources than during initially processing.