Sensing the Change

SCIENCE FOUNDATION IRELAND : The Clarity centre has bridged the gap between the physical world and digital information by developing a revolutionary technology to measure athletes’ performances using sensors, consequently improving their game

IMAGINE HAVING your golf swing digitally analysed and compared to Tiger Woods. It might be embarrassing at first, but it could help you make the adjustments to turn become a far better competitor at your sport.

It may seem a little far-fetched, but the technology to do it has already been developed and is in operation at Dublin City University(DCU).

More information are available here

Remote Health Monitoring with CHN

From SAP Network blogs:

Some months ago, I described the plan to develop a prototype based on the CHN services integrating wireless sensor technology for remote health monitoring (see here: https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/8857).

The doctor uses his application during a monthly checkup to lookup the Personal Medical Record (PMR) of a patient and to analyze the sensor data collected by a Body Sensor Network (BSN) the patient is wearing.

Today, I present the results of our work. In the prototype, we connected a simulated BSN that monitors heart rate, blood glucose, blood pressure and body temperature of the patient with services from the Collaborative Health Network (CHN). The sensor measurements are sent to the Enterprise Integration Component (EIC), a generic mediation layer for connecting wireless sensor networks (WSN) to any kind of business application. The EIC converts the incoming sensor measurements into a generic data format, stores and processes the data and provides a generic web-service based interface for business applications.

More info here.

Embedded Computing for the Rest of us: Project Sun SPOT

With just 850 students, Warren Wilson College in North Carolina is not awash in inter-departmental resources. So when Professor David Abernathy won a $100,000 grant to develop a geographic information system and wireless sensor network for the Cocobolo Nature Reserve in Panama, he needed some embedded programming expertise not likely to be found on campus.

Wireless sensors are ideal for studying changes in microclimates over time. As opposed to humans, sensors leave no footprints and break no branches, and can record conditions every 20 minutes around the clock. If you are a researcher interested in remote sensing, there are plenty of resources, including the University of California, Los Angeles’s Center for Embedded Network Sensing, which has more than $40 million in funding with graduate students coming from across the state. Abernathy admires the Center’s work, but given his limited grant, small department, and lack of graduate students, he needed something more off-the-shelf.

Read more here.

ns-2 network simulator: Free, yes; friendly, no

The open source network simulation tool ns-2 is an invaluable tool for researchers working on wired or wireless networks. I came across ns-2 while working on my thesis. I needed a network simulator, and since my college lacked the brand-name heavyweights, I had to look for an alternative that was free but could do the job. While ns-2 is free, it’s also pretty unfriendly.

ns-2 is a variant of the REAL network simulator. Over the past few years it has been evolving, and it is still far from complete. Several organizations have been involved in its development, including DARPA, Xerox, UCB, and Sun Microsystems. The objective has been to make a network simulation tool to study and analyze new ideas in detail before implementation.

Read the whole article on linux.com, here.

Some power benchmarks

An interesting blog entry about power consumption of an Arduino Mini Pro board with and without Xbee card can be found here. The conclusion is that if node is powered up only 3 seconds every 5 minutes, then a 220mAh 3V button cell battery should last around 13 days.

Contiki with small IPv6 stack

The new 2.2.2 release of Contiki contains uIPv6, the world’s smallest fully compliant IPv6 stack, SICSlowpan IPv6-over-802.15.4 header compression, and command line tools for HTTP interaction: wget and httpd.

BAIA Panel Wireless Sensor Networks

BAIA, Business Association Italy America, has organized a Panel has organized a Panel on “Business Models and Applications of Wireless Sensor Networks” on 10/08/2008. The event, sponsored by Pirelli Tyre, Telecom Italia and C’ Era una Volta, has taken place at the University of California at Berkeley with more than one hundred attendees from the academia and the industry. The Panel has been kindly introduced by Consul General of Italy in San Francisco Dott. Fabrizio Marcelli.

The distinguished panelists have been:
– Prof. David Culler, UC Berkeley, CTO and Co-Founder of Arch Rock
– Mike Horton, CEO and Co-Founder of Crossbow
– Prof. Raju Pandey, UC Davis, CTO and Co-Founder of Synapsense
– Prof. Kris Pister, UC Berkeley, CTO and Co-Founder of Dust Networks
– Dr. Joe Polastre, CTO and Co-Founder of Sentilla

The panel has been moderated by Prof. Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, Professor at UC Berkeley, Co-Founder of Cadence Design Systems and Honorary Chairman of BAIA. The Panelists have discussed possible business models for WSNs and have answered the questions of the audience on the market perspectives for the technology and on the obstacles still to be overcome.

http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=6128778504877856899&hl=en&fs=true

CFP: Body Sensor Networks 2009

The workshop on Body Sensor Networks (BSN 2009) is coming to Berkeley, CA this year. Paper submission deadline is 30th Jan, 2009 and the actual event is in June, 2009. More details on their website http://bsn2009.org.

World’s first IP-based wireless sensor network (6LoWPAN) enabled handheld tablet

KitWorks.fi Ltd. today  announced the 1st IP-based wireless sensor network (WSN) handheld device in the world, which interoperates seamlessly with IP-based 2.4GHz wireless sensor networks taking full advantage of the 6LoWPAN standard and IEEE 802.15.4 RF technology. The KitWrx 456 handheld tablet enhances smart object connectivity by enabling communication with 6LoWPAN based wireless networks and smart devices, along with RFID tags for enterprise applications in addition to previously used WLAN and barcode reading technologies. 

The KitWrx 456 handheld tablet was been developed jointly  with IPSO Alliance members (www.ipso-alliance.org), Sensinode Ltd. and the CENTRIA research center. The KitWrx 456 is enabled by Sensinode’s NanoStack™ 2.0 – the most sophisticated 6LoWPAN protocol stack solution. NanoStack 2.0 enables communication with 6LoWPAN enabled ad-hoc devices and infrastructure networks over an easy to use API. Windows CE applications on the KitWrx 456 can access the 6LoWPAN network directly. NanoStack 2.0 is available for licensing on OEM devices, giving easy compatibility with the KitWrx 456 and Sensinode NanoRouter™ 2.0 infrastructure solutions. 

802.15.4 vs ZigBee

The Wireless Sensor Network Research group (WSNRG) has published a new article titled 802.15.4 vs ZigBee which to help people to clarify with all the communications technologies which are used in the WSN field: 802.15.4, ZigBee, Mesh protocols, 2.4GHz, 868MHz and 900MHz bands… This first document compares both *IEEE 802.15.4* and *ZigBee* technologies and explains its main characteristics. Read the article here.