Intelligent Sensing Programme Meeting

Venue: Riverside Room, IEE (IET), Savoy Place, London, WC2R 0BL

To see meeting handouts and delegate list contact Duncan Wilson x52794

Research challenges in wireless sensor networks

Richard Egan – Thales Research and Technology (UK)

Focused on who might pay for WSN, the building monitoring example referring to the CMIPS project. Showed the temperature plots from ground level to ceiling height. The plot for a day showed the heating coming back on in middle of the night – why was this the case – the FM guy / engineer can explain it away but for the first time this *anomaly* was visible to others.

EU project: ESense – http://www.ist-e-sense.org/ a technology oriented project. High level aim is to improve energy efficiency. Focus is low power and bandwidth efficiency – aim is to achieve 20nJ/bit. The flip side to this is to reduce the amount of data that needs to be transmitted so the project is also looking at distributed processing, collaborative processing etc.

Sensor networks for real homes

Tobie Kerridge – Goldsmiths College, London

2 pieces of work from an interaction design perspective. Weather watchers + Home Health Horoscope. Emphasis on context of everyday usage. Equator project EPSRC funding.

Weather watchers – Philips and Helen Hamlyn research centre, RCA – looked at different ways to *show* weather features – the end user involved in the project (a retired met guy) however did not like any of the prototypes – not accurate enough for him.

Home Health Horoscope – Bill Gaver, intel sponsors – promoting well being in the home. The sample house hold was *analysed* by looking at: use of cleaning materials (business of activity), a sofa in the bedroom (a place for intimate moments) etc. from these a measure of *being* could be established. Using Crossbow Micaz. Prototyped boxes to contain motes for use in environment. All this data (mote, pict based serial data etc) is all collated and transformed in a *fuzzy* way to create a daily horoscope which can be printed out for the household. Offered to meet at later date to chat about how they are collating and aggregating data. Also noted that they have had serious battery issues with Micaz running in high power mode – 2-3 days battery life.

Oceanographic sensing – Challenges and opportunities

Matt Mowlen – National Oceanography Centre, Southampton

what to measure – CO2, Oxygen, Methane, Nutrients, Trace nutrients. Measurement density is a key parameter. Traditionally done via research ships. Had a nice diagram showing processes and platforms – man years on one axis and scale of measurement on the other, showing what can be monitored given these spatio temporal parameters – current problem is that measures have a huge variability – cannot get measures that satisfy Nyquist.

Bio fouling is another issue – when submerged in the sea (sometimes down to 6000 ft) other orgs in the sea want to grow on your sensors or even worse eat them!!

Next steps – looking at lab on chip systems

Sensor Networks for Monitoring Water Supply Systems – Lessons from Boston Water.

Ivan Stoianov – Imperial College

Working with Intel using Intel Mote 2, 32bit XScale PXA 271 processor. http://embedded.seattle.intel-research.net/wiki/index.php?title=Intel_Mote_2

Some interesting slides on water distribution system and what is being monitored – issues such as Jan 2005 discharge of 250 million cubic meters of raw sewage into Boston harbour *beacause pump went down and they were not sure of levels in system and did not want it to surface in the city*. 80 combined sewer outfalls around Boston harbour area – how can we monitor when an event occurs that could put bathers at risk? and make this activity available to them. http://db.csail.mit.edu/dcnui/

Centre for large scale infrastructure monitoring – http://www.senseITall.eu/ research project just funded by EPSRC Partners include Intel, Thames and Yorkshire water, MIT, Cambridge Uni. – looking for industrial partners.

Wireless MEMS sensors – A new vision for sound measurements

Richard Barham – National Physical Laboratory

NPL, QinetiQ, Centre for Ultrasonic Engineering (Strathclyde Uni) – have demo devices that they would like industrial partners to try – get contacts for Acoustics and potential for use in office environments? sound mapping on roads and the recent study that Verity published in ATN?

Road traffic and wind farm monitoring are the first users of the prototypes – does Arup have a good test application?

Post meeting… WiSiG WSN special interest group meeting

20 people in attendance – 36 members on community,

2 page doc to put in front of DTI Strategy Board to propose a WSN strategy for UK industry.

DKArvind has prepared a first draft of this document.

Resources to support KTN will come from the Sensors KTN – this is the benefit from hosting it within that entity. They will benefit if the community grows and is successful since their KTN is supporting a community.

discussed the different activities that this community / special interest group would want. mixed bag of responses, mostly tech suppliers, tech producers, academics – only a couple of integrators.

6-12 month meetings

volunteered to participate on the advisory board for WiSiG.

one of the metrics of KTN’s is the number of new collabs and meetings held.