wilamowski-b-m-irwin-j-d-industrial-communication-systems-2011

Industrial Strength Wireless Multimedia Sensor Network Technology 11-9
e.g., Transperth CAT service. WMSN identifies traffic patterns; chain effects; and scenarios in volume,
capacity, and rate of change in networks of roads that will lead to heavy congestion or traffic jams.
Sensors could also detect violations and transmit video streams to law-enforcement agencies to identify
the violator, or buffer images and streams in case of accidents for subsequent accident scene analysis.
The significance of WMSN is twofold: First, it is cost-effective as it eliminates the need to have a dedicated
wired infrastructure for communication with the traffic control center and, second, its deployment
is highly flexible, i.e., the wireless motes can be easily reconfigured for deploying at a new location.
11.5.3 Personal and Health Care
Health care is the prevention, treatment, and management of illness and the preservation of mental and
physical well-being through the services offered by the medical, nursing, and allied health professions.
According to World Health Organization health care embraces all the goods and services designed to promote
health, including “preventive, curative, and palliative interventions, whether directed to individuals
or to populations.” The organized provision of such services may constitute a health-care system.
Multimedia sensor networks can also be used in elderly personal and health care. WMSN is used
to identify the causes of illnesses that affect the elderly (e.g., dementia [R05]). Networks of wearable or
video and audio sensors can infer emergency situations and immediately connect elderly patients with
remote assistance services or with relatives. WMSN with telemedicine sensors can be used in monitoring
patients parameters such as body temperature, blood pressure, pulse oximetry, electrocardiogram,
and breathing activity remotely [HK03].
11.5.4 Habitat Monitoring
An explicitly spatial definition of habitat: The physical and biological environment used by an individual,
a population, a species, or perhaps a group of species. Habitat-monitoring schemes evaluate the
conservation status of habitats or habitat types by estimating the following sets of habitat attributes:
extent, biotic composition, biological structure, and physical structure. Habitat-monitoring schemes
can be classified into those with and those without a spatial aspect. Both can monitor one, few, most, or
all specific habitat types within a country, region, or landscape.
Several projects on habitat monitoring that use acoustic and video feeds are being envisaged, in which
information has to be conveyed in a time-critical fashion. For example, Intel Research Laboratory at
Berkeley initiated a collaborative project with the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor and the
University of California at Berkeley to deploy wireless sensor networks on Great Duck Island, Maine.
Their goal was to establish a habitat-monitoring kit for researchers worldwide.
11.5.5 target Tracking
Tracking concerns setting up a track on other objects momentarily viewed from the observer’s own location.
Target tracking concerns a process starting with determining the current and past locations and
other status of property in transit. Tracking and tracing is the completion of this process with uniformly
building a track of such property that are forwarded to, processed for, applied in, or disposed of usage.
WMSN can also be used in target-tracking application, where acoustic sensors are adopted to localize
the target. Each sensor node can acquire acoustic signals from the target. Various efficient algorithms are
used to perform robust target-position forecasting during target tracking. Then sensor nodes around the
target are awakened according to the forecasted target position. With committee decision of sensor nodes,
target localization is performed in a distributed manner and the uncertainty of detection is reduced.
These WMSN applications are very useful and interesting; however, they bring with them a lot of
challenges that need to be considered when developing any new WMSN motes or deploying a WMSN
network. These technical challenges are discussed in the following section.
© 2011 by Taylor and Francis Group, LLC