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?

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!