Wireless battery-powered sensors that monitor bridges and report changes (that may lead to failure) are easy to install, but it is unwieldy to provide power for the sensors. Each bridge needs at least several sensors, many installed in hard-to-access locations. Replacing millions of batteries could become a problem, adding to the expense of maintaining the bridges. The Clarkson researchers have found a way around this problem and have “completely eliminated battery from the equation”. More information here and here.

The past some hours have been very exciting for sensornet researchers world wide with one of the leading hardware companies (Moteiv) making a huge change of direction and embracing Java as the de facto development platform for sensornets. This move by Sentilla (previously known as Moteiv) can potentially broaden the field of sensornets and bring us closer to the “orginal” vision of pervasive computing of the late 90s (think Project Oxygen).

This move spawns a lot of open questions; what implications would it have on the direction in which sensornet research is heading? what happens to tailored operating systems for sensornets? are the days of C and NesC over? We don’t know and are open to debate!

At this point the Sentilla development kit is in beta version and is available by invitation only. We already know a number of people who simply can’t wait to get their hands on this development kit – you can try your luck here.

You may have heard of a field of computing and electronics called “Ubiquitous Computing” (a.k.a. “pervasive computing”, “everware”, etc.) which has always held great promise but has never taken off. Well, it’s about to and I suspect that the product being introduced as a beta by Sentilla will get things going and change the world as we know it.

Ubiquitous computing is the idea that everyday things everywhere are intelligent and networked. Is that a big deal? Why yes, because the possible applications of this type of technology are seemingly infinite and their impact will be immeasurable huge. The rise of ubiquitous computing, which thanks to Sentilla will take place sooner rather than later, is what I refer to as a Technami: A mega technology trend that fundamentally alters our world. To give you some context, other technamis include the internal combustion engine, the telephone, the computer, and the Internet. Technamis on the rise include genetic engineering and nanotechnology. And now I can add “ubiquitous computing” to the list because, for the first time, it actually seems feasible on a grand commercial scale.

More info here.

Try logging onto the website of your (at least my) favorite sensornet hardware manufacturer and see what happens. Yes we are talking about Moteiv and yes you are in for a big surprise. Moteiv has moved and no we are not talking about office location! Check it out http://www.moteiv.com

Update 1: If you are concerned about the future of your Moteiv products (like Tmote Sky, Mini etc.), here is an explanation.

Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology have created an acoustic sensor that can report the presence of small amounts of mesothelin, a molecule associated with a number of cancers. The ACuRay™ chip (standing for ACoustic micro-arRay) consists of a series of electrodes deposited on the surface of a thin film of zinc oxide, which allows the device to resonate, or vibrate, at a specific frequency when a current is applied.

The sensor itself, built on a base of silicon, could be mass-produced using very well known and inexpensive microelectronic fabrication techniques. To turn this array into a sensor, the researchers coated the zinc oxide surface with mesothelin-specific antibodies generated in a lab at the National Cancer Institute. These molecules are engineered versions of the antibodies the immune system creates to identify foreign intruders, such as microbial parasites.

When the mesothelin binds to an antibody, the added mass changes the frequency at which the acoustic wave passes between the electrodes on the surface of the device. The device is able to “hear” the pitch change due to nanomolar concentrations of mesothelin (just a few molecules amid billions) binding to antibodies on the chip. “We could, for example, detect a number of different markers for a single disease on a single chip no bigger than the tip of a fountain pen. With refinement, this technology could readily lead to an inexpensive, ubiquitous technology for researchers, physicians and the clinical laboratory.” said Hunt, a professor of electrical and computer at Georgia Tech and lead researcher on the project.

The findings were recently presented at the American Association for Cancer Research’s second International Conference on Molecular Diagnostics in Cancer Therapeutic Development.

More info here

Hi all,

I’m the newest contributor to WSNBLOG.com, so I thought I’d start out with a shameless plug for my own research. I’m working on integrating environmental sensors into cell phones. We’re doing a platform based on a bluetooth link to a phone, integrating into the battery compartment, with both off the shelf and bleeding edge sensors. We have some CO, NO2 and SO2 data we gathered in Ghana using an off the shelf datalogging solution this spring that we’ll publish shortly, and we have some cool algorithms that we’re about to publish as well.

The bleeding edge sensor is a MEMS particulate mass sensor which measures the change in frequency of a resonating FBAR as PM2.5 particles deposit on it via thermal phoresis. We will have the miniature prototype running this month (a larger prototype already works), and it will also integrate particle discrimination using IR and UV LED based interferometry.

The algorithmic research focuses on super-sampling for higher sensing precision, automatic calibration, and later work will include plume detection and context inference.

Check out the web site if you’re interested, and I’ll give some more details soon!

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~honicky/nsmarts

Save the date – January 22-24, 2008. Sun will be hosting the first Java Mobile & Embedded Developer Days Conference at our Santa Clara, CA campus – an event dedicated to mobile and embedded Java technologies and applications.

The Call for Papers is now open and will end October 31, 2007.

This is your chance to participate! Submit a session abstract, grab a few friends & suggest a panel discussion, consider showcasing a cool application or just plan to come & participate as an audience member.

Content areas are expected to be centered around JavaME, and open source aspects of the Mobile & Embedded Community – including traditional phone and PDA development on the Java ME platform as well as SunSPOT wireless sensors, Trackbot and Java robotics, and other small Java software-based systems & applications.

But the actual sessions will really be based on the submissions & participation from the Java developer community.

The clock is ticking – check out the Conference site for more information.

Considering a wireless sensor network whose nodes are distributed randomly over a given area, a probability model for the network lifetime is provided. Using this model and assuming that packet generation follows a Poisson distribution, an analytical expression for the complementary cumulative density function (CCDF) of the lifetime is obtained. Using this CCDF, one can accurately find the probability that the network achieves a given lifetime. It is also shown that when the number of sensors, N, is large, with an error exponentially decaying with N, one can predict whether or not a certain lifetime can be achieved. The results of this work are obtained for both multi-hop and single-hop wireless sensor networks and are verified with computer simulation. The approaches of this paper are shown to be applicable to other packet generation models and the effect of the area shape is also investigated.

By M. Noori et al.

More info here.

CALL FOR PAPERS, TUTORIALS, PANELS

ICN 2008, The Seventh International Conference on Networking

April 13-18, 2008 – Cancun, Mexico

Site: http://www.iaria.org/conferences2008/ICN08.html

Submissions will be peer-reviewed, published by IEEE CPS, posted in IEEE Digital Library, and indexed with the major indexes. Extended versions of selected papers will be invited for specialized journals.

Topics include Wireless Sensor Networks

Submission deadline : November 5, 2007

GainSpan, a Wi-Fi sensor company, today unveiled an ultra low power wireless sensor network that utilizes Wi-Fi. GainSpan’s semiconductor and software solutions are said to deliver the benefits of Wi-Fi with 5-10 years of battery life for applications like temperature and condition monitoring of industrial equipment.
The GainSpan GS1010 SoC is an ultra low-power System-on-a-Chip (SoC) solution that leverages the widely deployed Wi-Fi with existing management systems, including enterprise network management systems, as well as existing SCADA industrial and building automation systems.

GainSpan’s product line was designed for long battery life and flexibility using an embedded 802.11b/g radio, two 32-bit ARM7 microcontrollers, real-time clock and power management unit, FLASH and SRAM memories along with multiple I/Os, and support for location awareness.

Compared to most Bluetooth and Zigbee chips, WiFi sensors have longer range with lower cost. Power has been the sticking point. The GS1010 is sampling now, with production quantities available in December 2007, and is priced at $15.00 in 10,000 unit quantities.

More info here.