The IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society (IMS) is preparing this survey to identify trends in sensors and their configurations for the next 5 years.

Both Sensorsmag.com and Sensors and Transducers Journal are supporting us in broadcasting and publishing results from this survey.

The survey is here.

Your input is very important to us for accurate and useful results. Your contribution to the survey is anonymous to protect your privacy and confidentiality. Please complete this survey by September 30, 2008.

They will publish the results in the open literature. Each day they will update the summary results from the survey. The results will be at http://imm.ieee-ims.org/.

Thank you for contributing!

Building an on-the-fly wireless communications networks is a vital part of firefighting, handling hostage situations, and dealing with other emergencies. But it is difficult to build such networks quickly and reliably.

Soon these emergency wireless networks could help build themselves. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recently presented details of two experimental networks that tell emergency workers when to set down wireless transmitters to ensure a good signal.

NIST built two prototype networks using off-the-shelf hardware. One operates at 900 megahertz and uses Crossbow MICA2 Motes to transmit radio signals. The other, a Wi-Fi network operating at 2.4 gigahertz , uses Linux-based Gumstix transmitters.

More info here.

The 3rd Summer School on Applications of Wireless Sensor Networks and Wireless Sensing in the Future Internet (senZations’08) will conclude this afternoon at the Jozef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

The five day program consisted in lectures and seminars from researchers strongly involved in the field, from both Academy and Industry. You may like to review slide-shows online. At the time of this writing there are two interesting files:

a) Collaborative WSN Programming: this is divided in two sections. Part One describes Open issues and Programming environments in WSN, while focusing in TinyOS and 802.15.4 radios. Part Two is devoted to Octopus, a visual control tool for WSN developments specifically designed for TinyOS 2.x. It’s meant to empower users and developers to control a WSN from node-level-code to global performance figures, including node localization, parameter tuning, etc. (Presented by A. Ruzzelli, UCD)

b) WSN HW design and experiences from building a testbed: This illustrative example of a WSN application design describes the hardware perspective of a platform and infrastruture currently employed in the MOSAR Project. The work is part of a Frech collaboration effort to advance our understanding of antimicrobial resistance of bacteria responsible for emerging infections in hospitals. The SenLab Consortium will open (beta) public access to the system in Q1 of 2009. (Presented by A. Fraboulet, INRIA Ares - CITI Lab.)