An ultra-low power silicon chip could pave the way for future wireless body networks that use ‘digital plasters’ in healthcare applications.
The Sensium chip, developed by Toumaz Technology – a spin-out from Imperial College London – is said to consume up to 100 times less power than any other similar device in the world and employs the spin-out’s proprietary AMx technology as part of an intelligent system on a chip.

The complete story here.

Lowered into a muddy stretch of the Hudson River, the unmanned submarine dove through the murk and zigzagged downstream, meticulously collecting information on the water’s condition and transmitting it to scientists.
The robotic explorer, powered by sunlight and navigating on its own, took only a test run, but researchers hope vehicles like it will become part of a river-wide network of sensors that provide constant, real-time data on spills, fish migrations and other aspects of the river’s ecology.
The embryonic Riverscope network is one of many so-called sensor webs for monitoring the planet’s ecosystems, from ocean currents to mice scurrying across corn fields.

The complete article is available here.

High tech devices now in development may help compensate for loss of function due to Alzheimer’s, enhance care and treatment, and foster independence for people with Alzheimer’s and their caregivers, according to new research reported today.
During a six week long study, wireless sensor networks and an online journal were used to assess participants’ typical levels of social interaction.

The complete story here.

There is a very cool Eclipse Plugin available (in beta testing) for TinyOS from here.

The plugin is basically aimed at making TinyOS and NesC programming easier. “Newcomers who have little experience in writing sensor network applications need help on fundamental aspects of TinyOS development. For one, getting used to the design philosophy of the operating system is not easy. Especially its completely modular application design and the unique way of combining modules by means of a so called “wiring” require some time to get used to.” … read ACM RealWSN’06 paper here

Software developers and engineers working with sensors and sensor networks can now reduce their development time up to 90 percent thanks to SensorBridge, which was launched today by Augusta Systems Inc. SensorBridge is a sensor-based toolset, featuring design-time and run-time components, which enables rapid development and flexible management of diverse sensor-based applications.
SensorBridge enhances the development of Windows-based applications using Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. When deployed, SensorBridge operates on end-user computers, servers and at-the-point of sensors or sensor aggregators.

You can read more about this software here.

This site is dedicated to various aspects of soil ecology, related educational materials and will provide online access to live research data. The researchers are currently collecting data from the network of wireless sensors measuring the environmental conditions in the soil.

Visit the website here.

Researchers at Microsoft are working on technology that they hope will someday enable people to browse online maps for up-to-the-minute information about local gas prices, traffic flows, restaurant wait times, and more. Eventually, says Suman Nath, a Microsoft researcher who works on the project, which is called SenseWeb, they would like to incorporate the technology into Windows Live Local (formerly Microsoft Virtual Earth), the company’s online mapping platform.

The complete story is available here.

Great lectures on WSN programming are available here.

I found these lecture notes to be a useful and enlightening survey of the field.

In bridging the digital divide, two important criteria are cost-effectiveness, and power optimization. While 802.11 is cost-effective and is being used in several installations in the developing world, typical system configurations are not really power efficient. In this paper, we propose a novel “Wake-on-WLAN” mechanism for coarse-grained, on-demand power on/off of the networking equipment at a remote site. The novelty also lies in our implementation of a prototype system using low-power 802.15.4-based sensor motes. We describe the prototype, as well as its evaluation on field in a WiFi testbed. Preliminary estimates indicate that the proposed mechanism can save significant power in typical rural networking settings.

The complete paper is available here.

A very well writtent tutorial on ns-2 is available here.

Tools used in the tutorial are available for download here.