Climate change and energy shortage, potentially, are demanding people to think twice now when they want to switch on their heating or air-conditioning. Rightly so, human has been too wasteful for too long. Gas guzzling vehicles for style, for recognition. Electronic equipments switched on all day long for no good reasons. My company has just participated in the “Big Switch Off” this weekend to see how much energy companies have wasted had they not switched off unused equipments over the weekend.

Question is, do we actually need such studies to learn that we should be switching off unused equipments? It does not matter how much current the equipment draws. If it is not needed, turn it off! Simple as that. Sometimes it is just frustrating to see human’s ignorant behaviours. Of course companies would want to save their fuel bills, especially now when the economy is doing so badly, jobs cutting everywhere, everyday. But it is when it becomes the companies’ job to persuade employees to save energy that it seems a bit laughable.

It’s the same at home. There are products in the market where people can plug them onto their power sockets to see how much energy they are consuming on their devices before they will decide whether or not they will want to use less of those devices, for example when not needed! They want information in their face before they will consider changing their behaviours. Switching off things is just too “time-consuming”, sigh, as if most of these people are always so occupied.

With such inconsiderate human behaviour, it almost becomes inevitable that it makes sense to “institutionalise” plans to save energy. For example new buildings to be built need to meet certain level of energy efficiency criteria before they will be approved. Good news is this will present opportunities and incentives for builders to come up with better building designs that are energy efficient, sustainable and environmental friendly. It is true that wireless sensor networks will probably come in quite handy in helping to improve building design. But I think it will mostly be in the arena of improving comfort rather than energy efficiency, unfortunately. Afterall building materials are limited and are well studied by the construction industry already?

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Fast forward a couple of years and imagine that we now have the “perfect” wireless sensors, what do we foresee them to add to our life? Consider the scenario where these sensors are dotted everywhere, can last an awful long time, hardy, reliable, with their position known (either by themselves or by somebody else), cheap enough to be disposable in an environmental friendly way after use, can be re-tasked or upgraded easily, etc, etc. There are going to be an awful lot of physical information that will be captured by these devices. So now what? What do we do with these information?

Like our 5 senses, we don’t need every single piece of information we sense all the time. So the capability to boil these raw information down to something meaningful and useful will be crucial. But that’s only the start. We need to be able to close the loop. As in we need to be able to do something to the information we possess, however important and useful they are. Take for example temperature sensors dotted around in a room. We have all these information about the temperature of the room. Temperature near the window is lower than the rest of the room. There’s big temperature variations across the height of the room, as the air vent is located at the ceiling. Based on these information, can we, or more precisely in this case the air vent, do something about improving the comfort level of the people who occupy the room? Maybe not, as some may argue that temperature alone is not enough. The air vent is too old-fashioned and we can’t control in which direction we want the air to blow. And the definition of comfort could well be very different for different people. But the important thing is to be able to at least control the room temperature based on the feedback from the sensors. So the key is a closed-loop process. But the loop need not be immediate, where say the air vent will be immediately controlled. Buildings or facilities may be improved based on the information gathered over time. Beautiful. Isn’t it?

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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!

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