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.)

The Wireless Sensor Network Research Group has published a couple of articles regarding the detection of people using WSN. In the first one they use the infrared radiation which provides a PIR sensor to detect movement of objects which temperature is over an specific threshold. In the second one they have integrated an ultrasonic sensor which emits ultrasounds and receives their echoes, this method is able also to predict the exact distance to the object in the same way bats do.

The frequency with which landslides ravage Kerala, India, brought Maneesha Ramesh and her colleagues at Amrita School of Engineering (ASE), near Quilon, to the sleepy town. Together with several European universities and firms, they are installing a network of wireless sensors that can pick up the slightest of rumblings in the earth in order to alert the people to an impending landslide in real time. “If we can pick up the right signals, we stand a good chance of informing the people about any threat days in advance,” says Maneesha.

More info here.

The 3rd International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare, Pervasive Health’09, will be held in London, April 1-3, 2009.

Pervasive healthcare may be defined from two perspectives. First, it is the development and application of pervasive computing (or ubiquitous computing, ambient intelligence) technologies for healthcare, health and wellness management. Second, it seeks to make healthcare available to anyone, anytime, and anywhere by removing locational, time and other restraints while increasing both the coverage and quality of healthcare.

The CFP can be found here

Important Dates
Paper Submission Deadline: December 5, 2008
Notification of Acceptance: February 8, 2009
Camera-ready Manuscripts due: February 27, 2009

On a rolling hillside planted with row upon row of Cabernet grapes, viticulturist Jason Cole waxes eloquent about the elusive notion of terroir, a term French farmers use to describe the je ne sais quoi of crops harvested in any given locale.

“Grapes, chocolates, coffee, these are all incredibly good at soaking up their environments and spitting them out in their fruits,” said Cole, who oversees the preening and pampering of more than 500 acres of vines planted at the Stagecoach Vineyard in Napa County.

That vineyard is a test bed for a new wireless sensing technology that measures soil wetness, wind speed, temperature and humidity to take the statistical pulse of the vineyard’s microclimates to help determine how often and how much to irrigate.
Fore info are available here

In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) the week of August 18, the MIT team describes assembling and successfully testing two of the three key components of a battery. A complete battery is on its way.

“To our knowledge, this is the first instance in which microcontact printing has been used to fabricate and position microbattery electrodes and the first use of virus-based assembly in such a process,” wrote MIT professors Paula T. Hammond, Angela M. Belcher, Yet-Ming Chiang, and colleagues.

Further, the technique itself “does not involve any expensive equipment and is done at room temperature,” said Belcher, the Germeshausen Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Biological Engineering.

More info can be found here

Have you been willing to program your motes on a Mac Book Air?

If so, this seems like your go! go! time with the Perk kit.
The new release of the Sentilla Suite for OS X features:

• Full Java compliance with CLDC 1.1
• Native Sentilla Work IDE
• Firmware burning for both gateways and motes
• Sentilla Hostserver for OS X for managing mote applications
• Samples, tutorials, and cheat sheets
• Download and run applications from Sentilla Labs

There is also a release for Ubuntu on its way.

More info in their forum and here.

The Distributed Computing Group at ETH Zurich has made a beta version of its Eclipse Plugin for TinyOS 2.x public. The new plugin supports real time error detection, code completion, navigation within source files, and flashing from within Eclipse.
An installation guide and help for first steps is available at http://tos-ide.ethz.ch/wiki/index.php. Suggestions, comments and bug reports are welcome, contact information are on the download page.