Wireless Sensors Extend Internet's Reach (Oh Joy)
Note: Well I can see some really great uses for this technology. I love the pollutant monitoring solutions that could test for toxics an then send an alert when some foreign substance was found.
"To the untrained eye, the sleek, airy building constructed atop a decommissioned nuclear reactor at the University of California, Los Angeles could pass for high-tech office space. A closer inspection of the glass-and-steel facade reveals dozens of miniature, low-resolution cameras and sensors. They're wirelessly linked to computers throughout the 6,000-square-foot space, keeping tabs on traffic flow in public areas and monitoring temperature, humidity and acoustics."
The building serves as a testing ground for developing and perfecting wireless sensing technology to connect major chunks of the real world to the Internet. Such networks could monitor the environment for pollutants, gauge whether structures are at risk of collapse or remotely follow medical patients in real time.
"I see this as the next wave of extending the Internet into the physical world," said computer scientist Deborah Estrin, who heads the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing, a UCLA-based consortium of six schools.
The researchers at the consortium have already scattered wireless networks of nodes in the rice paddies of Bangladesh, rain forests of Costa Rica and wilderness of California's San Jacinto Mountains - all for the sake of keeping a closer eye on the world.
Once the stuff of science fiction, wireless sensor networking is quickly catching on, attracting the attention of the military, academics and corporations. Just as the Internet virtually connected people with personal computers, the prospect of wireless arrays sprinkled in buildings, farmland, forests and hospitals promise to create unprecedented links between people and physical locations.
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Posted to WiFi / Wireless