There was a short article in the October IET magazine about using a small ZigBee sensor the size of a hearing aid to collect and transmit data from the human body. I suspect that hearing-aid-size sensor, which is “inspired by the semicircular canals of the inner ear responsible for controlling motion and balance”, is probably only made up of a simple accelerometer sensor, which can be easily found in most prototype wireless sensor motes on offer in the market nowadays. Nothing earth-shattering really, in my opinion, merely decoupling a simple sensor from wires. If the “whole package” is just about monitoring raw data collected from the sensor then that is even more disappointing. The power of modern sensor network lies in its ability to gather information from multiple cheap wireless sensors, with the resultant information giving more accurate insight into the sensed object or enviroment than a single sensor can achieve. I’d expect more from the “pioneer” in body sensor networks!

About a year ago we wanted to get our hands on some Sun SPOTs motes for our project because we have more people around that know how to write Java applications and use the familiar development tools (not many people heard of TinyOS’s nesC, and using the primitive word editor to write applications seems to be the norm!). But unfortunately Sun, or more precisely that particular team, was unable to deliver their products on time, not to mention shipping products outside the US, due to ROHS issues.

Now another major mote manufacturer seems to share the vision of using Java as the platform for developing applications for the wireless sensor motes. “We at Sentilla (formerly Moteiv) are extremely excited about the use of Java technology in our products”, quoted from Joe Polastre of Sentilla (see here for more details). As I said, this makes a lot of sense and it will be interesting to see if Crossbow will soon follow suit. Java may soon be the future.