Beep Beep - Mote Runner has arrived!

Mote Runner is a run-time environment for mote-class wireless sensor networks (WSN) designed by IBM’s Zürich Research Laboratory. It consists of an on-mote run-time platform based on a virtual machine introducing its own byte-code language, tools (e.g., converter, assembler) to develop mote applications in Java and C# including plug-in integration with Eclipse (for Java) and Visual Studio (for C#), a mote and network simulation environment to facilitate application development, and a Web-based deployment and monitoring framework.

The IBM Mote Runner run-time environment for WSNs, currently under development, tackles these challenges in a holistic manner. Thus, at its core, Mote Runner provides a high-level, language-friendly, resource-efficient and high-performance virtual machine that shields portable applications from hardware specifics.

Currently, IBM Mote Runner runs exclusively on Crossbow's IRIS Mote platform. The IRIS mote comprises of an Atmel ATmega1281 processor, an Atmel RF230 radio controller for 2.4 GHz communication in accordance with to IEEE 802.15.4, 128 KB of program flash memory, and 8 KB of RAM. Crossbow offers various sensor boards for the IRIS platform, of which Mote Runner currently supports the MTS420 partially, namely its dual-axis accelerometer and the relative humidity / temperature sensor.

The platform supports software development in C# and Java, albeit it only supports a subset with limited functionality. For instance, it supports no threads. Nevertheless, the software environment can be configured dynamically and be reconfigured in the field. And the virtual machine makes sure applications can be moved to motes with different hardware. The development team hitherto worked in stealth mode. But the platform will be available "in the near future", Kramp asserted.

The core requirements to reap the promised benefits of a fully business-process-integrated infrastructure for deploying large numbers of sensors and actuators are security and end-to-end optimizations for such systems. This requires a well-designed ecosystem comprising inexpensive devices, as well as simple and bullet-proof device programmability for easy integration and use by specialists of the application domain, not of the device technology.

The IBM Mote Runner system addresses these challenges with a high-performance, low-footprint, standards-based software middleware platform comprising a hardware-agnostic and language-independent virtual machine together with development and integration tooling to easily create and manage applications for open sensor and actuator networks.

For more details on MoteRunner, visit the project site here.

In a BLIP, pervasive IP has arrived.

by Martin Turon, Director of Wireless Software, Crossbow Technology, Inc.

IPv6 was invented in 1998, over ten years ago, yet less than 1% of devices use it.

Why is IPv6 important?

The first answer is "lots of addresses".

Think of your PC and the RAM memory inside. Until recently, 32-bit processors were pervasive, and you couldn't put more than 4GB (4 billion bytes) of memory in them because of the limits in 32-bit address spaces. Now most new computers are 64-bit, and they can address 18 quintillion bytes. The Internet will eventually be forced to "upgrade" its address space as well. Currently over 99% of devices use IPv4 which uses 32-bit IP addresses that are most commonly displayed as 4 bytes in decimal: 192.168.1.100. If you want to host a web server to the world, you typically claim a static IP and one of the 4 billion possibilities is yours forever. But the population of the world is 6.7 billion, so there aren't enough to go around! And what if everyone wants multiple devices that can be uniquely addressed to serve some critical information like a cluster of wireless sensor nodes?

IPv6 is clearly the answer. It provides a 128-bit address space allowing for over 240 undecillion uniquely addressable devices. To put that in perspective, the soon-to-be 6.8 billion people in the world will each be able to have over 300 million subnets with over 18 quintillion devices in each one. That is a total of over 50 octillion uniquely addressable devices per person!  Note: The unallocated address pools in IPv4 are anticipated to be exhausted in 2012.

Which leads to the second answer: "government mandates".

In May 2009, the Federal CIO Council of the US government issued an official roadmap for IPv6 adoption. The report provides a detailed overview of the technology, it's benefits, tips on the various services and how to transition. It also tasks other government agencies with developing concrete plans for how they will deploy IPv6 and requires quarterly review of their progress.

"We can't keep operating in an IPv4 world when we're talking about sensor networks, wireless communications and mobile networks. We need more IP addresses - globally unique IP addresses - and that's what IPv6 provides. We need a target network architecture that's scalable, secure and stable." - Pete Tseronis, Federal IPv6 Working Group Chair and Deputy Associate CIO of the Department of Energy

Since the release of this document, a flurry of articles regarding IPv6 adoption has been written up in the press.

---

How can big IPv6 addresses fit on tiny motes?

Almost in anticipation of the recent uptick in IPv6 adoption, back in March some researchers at UC Berkeley released an Open Source implementation of IPv6 running on TinyOS 2.x called BLIP (Berkeley Low-power Internet Protocol). The BLIP stack runs on mote-class hardware, specifically the TelosB and MicaZ. How did they manage to fit a protocol that uses 128-bit addresses onto a platform with only 4KB of RAM? Well, beyond the fact that Stephen Dawson-Haggerty and other contributors are really really smart, the IETF has had a number of efforts to define ways for IPv6 to run on lossy, low bandwidth links for a while. The IETF timeline follows:

RFC 1883,2460 - IPv6 Specification
RFC 1885,4443 - ICMPv6 Internet control message protocol
RFC 3142 - IPv6-to-IPv4 translation
RFC 3315,4580,4649,4704 - DHCPv6 Dynamic, automatic address assignment
RFC 4861 - Neighbor Discovery
RFC 4862 - Stateless Addr Autoconf
RFC 4944 - IPv6 over IEEE 802.15.4 (6LowPAN) 

Drafts: HYDRO routing (part of ROLL [routing over low-power, lossy links] effort)

Papers: IP is dead, long live IP,  Extended Internet Architecture PhD Thesis by Jonathan Hui

---

Why is it cool?

IPv6 running on motes is cool because it really leverages what IPv6 was designed for -- ubiquitous computing.  Imagine a day when all of your appliances and consumer electronics will be able to talk to each other and provide you real time data on their energy usage, health, etc.  The ZigBee alliance has recently signed up to define a specification for an IPv6 stack in addition to an RF4CE stack for remote controls and consumer electronics.  Similar to how WiFi is integrated into all sorts of products today and just works, ZigBee may make it so cheap, tiny devices of the future can provide direct IPv6 connectivity over low-power, low-bandwidth radios.

---

What is the status of BLIP?  When will it be released?

BLIP is a work in progress.  It is currently fully supported on the TelosB platform and works on MICAz when compiled in a memory-constrained mode.  It is being folded into the TinyOS 2.x core with a slated release date of late August 2009.  The version in contrib/berkeley/blip is the correct one to use, however, as that one will actually build without manually adding radio stack modifications that are still being negotiated.  IRIS support is in the works as well with the initial port being done by European researchers Miklos Maroti and Lars Schor.  An improved release candidate of BLIP is slated to be pushed into contrib as early as next week.

---

Where can the BLIP source code be found?  How do you use it?

1) Download Xubuntos 2.1 VMware image (Howto)
2) Start the VM, login as:
  username: xubuntos
  password: tinyos
3) Start a Terminal
4) Prepare your VM to run BLIP as follows:

- Install IPv6 tools:

    sudo apt-get install netcat6

- Update tinyos-2.x trees from CVS:

    cd /opt
    # hit return for anonymous password
    cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@tinyos.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/tinyos login
    cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@tinyos.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/tinyos co -P tinyos-2.x
    cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@tinyos.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/tinyos co -P tinyos-2.x-contrib/berkeley

- Add a simple environment setup script

cd /opt/tinyos-2.x-contrib/berkeley/blip
cat <<-EOF > setenv
export TOSROOT=/opt/tinyos-2.x
export TOSDIR=/opt/tinyos-2.x/tos
export LOWPAN_ROOT=$PWD
export TOSMAKE_PATH="$LOWPAN_ROOT/support/make"
EOF

- Build the driver

    cd /opt/tinyos-2.x/support/sdk/c/sf
    ./bootstrap
    ./configure
    make
    cd /opt/tinyos-2.x-contrib/berkeley/blip/support/sdk/c/blip
    make

- Patch motelist to handle mib520 for micaz discovery

cd ~
cat <<-EOF > motelist-linux.mib520.patch
--- motelist-linux	2006-12-12 10:23:01.000000000 -0800
+++ /usr/bin/motelist	2009-05-19 11:28:26.000000000 -0700
@@ -61,7 +61,10 @@ sub scan_sysfs {
 
 # Scan /sys/bus/usb/drivers/usb for FTDI devices
 my @ftdidevs =
- grep { (\$_->{UsbVendor}||"") eq "0403" && (\$_->{UsbProduct}||"") eq "6001" }
+ grep { (\$_->{UsbVendor}||"") eq "0403" && 
+ (((\$_->{UsbProduct}||"") eq "6001") || 
+ ((\$_->{UsbProduct}||"") eq "6010")) 
+ }
 map { {
 SysPath => \$_,
 UsbVendor => snarf("\$_/idVendor",1),
EOF
cd /usr/bin
sudo patch -p0 < motelist-linux.mib520.patch

- Download Blip.micaz.patch

 - Patch the blip contrib sources to add automatic micaz support
and fix some build issues.

    cd /opt/tinyos-2.x-contrib/berkeley/blip
    patch -p0 < ~/blip.micaz.patch

5) Use your prepared VM to build and deploy BLIP:

- Enable the BLIP build environment:

    cd /opt/tinyos-2.x-contrib/berkeley/blip
    source setenv

- Build the UDPEcho app and base station for telosb and micaz:

    cd /opt/tinyos-2.x-contrib/berkeley/blip/apps/UDPEcho
    make telosb blip
    make micaz blip

    cd /opt/tinyos-2.x-contrib/berkeley/blip/apps/IPBaseStation
    make blip telosb
    make blip micaz

- Connect a TelosB via USB, and flash it with the base station code
(Install FTDI drivers if needed)
(Accept TelosB device when dialog appears)
(Right click USB device in lower right of VM and select connect)

    motelist # find ttyUSB port to use
    cd /opt/tinyos-2.x-contrib/berkeley/blip/apps/IPBaseStation
    make blip telosb install,64 bsl,/dev/ttyUSB0

- Connect a MicaZ via USB, and flash it with the remote node code
  (Install FTDI drivers if needed)
  (Accept MIB520 device when dialog appears)
  (Right click USB device in lower right of VM and select connect)

 	 
    motelist # find ttyUSB port to use
    cd /opt/tinyos-2.x-contrib/berkeley/blip/apps/UDPEcho
    make blip micaz install,1 mib520,/dev/ttyUSB0

6) Fire up Linux network driver to communicate with BLIP network:

- Start the ip-driver

    cd /opt/tinyos-2.x-contrib/berkeley/blip/support/sdk/c/blip
    sudo ./ip-driver /dev/ttyUSB0 telosb
    # password: tinyos	 
    # blip console commands:
    # blip:xubuntos-tinyos> help
    # blip:xubuntos-tinyos> log WARN
    # blip:xubuntos-tinyos> routes	

7) Use standard IPv6 tools to access the remote BLIP nodes:

    # Ping - base station and remote node
    ping6 2001:470:1f04:56d::64
    ping6 2001:470:1f04:56d::1

    # Access shell on remote node
    nc6 2001:470:1f04:56d::1

Note that BLIP ships with support for pinging a node with standard the ping6 tool, shelling into a node with netcat (the shell is a custom one, not ssh, type help to see available commands), and over-the-air reprogramming of nodes with a deluge-like interface.  BLIP is an exciting software development for the TinyOS community and users of TelosB, MICAz, and soon IRIS platforms.  We encourage you to try it and track its rapid development.

Martin Turon is Crossbow's Director of Wireless Software. Not only an expert in the field of wireless sensor networks, Martin has been instrumental in simplifying the WSN user experience with advancements in interface and server tools using his background in video game design, mobile phone software and operating systems. He is the current Chair of the ZigBee WSN group which is working to establish the standard for low-power routing while leading the Wireless software development team at Crossbow for future product enhancement. Martin obtained degrees from University of California, Berkeley in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He has also studied Artificial Intelligence at University of California, Los Angeles and received a certificate in Math for Financial Engineering from Haas Business School. Martin is an avid lover of indie rock and performs with various ad-hoc musical projects.

Who said it ain't easy being green?

It seems that everywhere you turn you are being encouraged to go green. I hung out with a friend the other day and she was wearing a shirt that said 'Green is the new black.' The idea of being environmentally friendly has taken our world by storm. The Discovery channel brought us Planet Earth to give us a closer look at the different environments on our planet and how little by little we are altering and damaging it. Musicians from around the world held a 24 hour concert called Live Earth to capture an audience of millions and educate them on how to live a more eco-friendly lifestyle. There are more and more hybrid cars on the road and most products you buy sport the small leaf logo advertising that they are environmentally conscious. President Obama has assembled a dream team of environmental experts and specialists to focus on clean energy and climate change issues.

If you look around, you realize that our society is truly looking to conserve resources and use the technology and knowledge we have to ensure we are saving the Earth. Crossbow's eKo platform is a truly breakthrough product that revolutionizes the way we use the resources in our environment. Imagine saving water but increasing your yield and the quality of your harvest? The eKo platform is a device that not only stems from the knowledge and genius of taking any environment and making it smart, but also from knowledge of our world and how it works. The ease with which the nodes can be deployed favors leaving an environment intact without having to run wires and cables disrupting the natural flow all around. The system has been deployed in various applications ranging from the standard vineyard/ orchard/ crop monitoring, to greenhouse gas monitoring in nurseries, to measuring the snow pack/run-off to determine what type of drought conditions regions can anticipate, to structural integrity, to water level measurements, to contamination of watersheds for environmental protection and much, much more.

As we continue to see this product deployed around the world, the consistent theme is that the platform is so easy to use and leaves users with a higher understanding of the their environment. By integrating the various sensors offered with the eKo platform, users can determine when disease conditions could occur. Instead of having to spray chemicals over their entire crop, growers can pinpoint which block, row or plant is in danger. By knowing and monitoring the environmental parameters that cause these conditions, not only can they be avoided but the use of unnatural elements and chemicals can be prevented preserving the natural state of the area. The ability to gather this data, analyze it and make decisions is all available in the eKoView web application that comes free with the eKo system. Bringing this type of data collection to the internet has transformed the notion of connecting with the world around you. It is truly an eKo-centric solution to the environmental issues we face today. It seems fitting that this type of technology would come from a company based in the San Francisco Bay Area, city of St. Francis patron saint of the environment, and the heart of the Silicon Valley known for its high technology advancements.

Today as we recognize Earth Day it is important for people to embrace the new technologies looking to preserve and help conserve our planet's resources. A system like eKo provides users with a solar powered wireless device thus removing the need for battery replacement and disposal. It's sealed enclosure allows it to weather the elements ranging from snow covered mountains to the heat of the California sun. It's ability to interface many types of sensors make it a requisite part of any environmental monitoring deployment. eKo provides a platform that can be used to create smart water grids, detect air pollution, do conservation studies, perform chemical detection, ensure water quality, monitor urban environments, etc. The ability to capture data in these and many more applications wirelessly and easily will help us move towards a future Earth that is cared for and that can be healed with proper conservation of its resources. Thanks to the convergence of technology and environmental awareness in eKo - It is finally easy to be green!

For more information on the eKo system, contact Crossbow Technology at eko.sales@xbow.com or at 1-800-XBOW-TEC.

Testbed Testing

Wireless sensor network testbeds are critical for understanding and meeting the technical challenges of networks deployed in real world scenarios. Hardware and software testbeds have become the preferred basis for experimenting with embedded wireless sensor network applications. They provide a means for developing and evaluating sensor network technology in a controlled and instrumented environment. Experimentation with current hardware and software platforms, allows users to not only demonstrate applicability in real environments but also to validate prototypes. Compared to field deployments, the testbeds yield substantial efficiency in instrumenting potentially long-lived experiments, which is valuable in the debugging, validation, and integration phases of reliable wireless sensor networks. Universities and labs across the world have set up networks of hundreds of nodes using a Mote platform from Crossbow's suite of wireless sensor network devices choosing from simple platforms such as the TelosB to advanced devices like the Imote2.

Researchers at the University of Buffalo, SUNY and Georgia Institute of Technology have written an article focused on the the idea of taking wireless testbeds to the next level by incorporating multimedia and characterizing the challenges of wireless multimedia sensor networks (WMSNs). The availability of low-cost hardware has enabled the development of WMSNs, i.e., networks of resource-constrained wireless devices that can retrieve multimedia content such as video and audio streams, still images, and scalar sensor data from the environment, along with standard wireless sensor networks. Research is being conducted on prototypes of multimedia sensors and their integration into testbeds for experimental evaluation of algorithms and protocols for WMSNs. Open research issues and future research directions, both at the device level and at the testbed level, are discussed and tested constantly.  Network testbeds allow the effectiveness of algorithms and protocols to be evaluated by providing a controlled environment for measuring network performance.

Every testbed utilizes a specific Mote platform that is optimized for that particular testbed's focus. The wireless sensor platform is chosen based on its available capabilities to allow for multimedia integration. A WMSN is a distributed wireless system that interacts with the physical environment by observing it through multiple media. Furthermore, it can perform online processing of the retrieved information and react to it by combining technologies from diverse disciplines such as wireless communications and networking, signal processing, computer vision, control, and robotics. Applications in the real world that would benefit from WMSNs were categorized into the categories of surveillance, traffic monitoring and enforcement, personal and health care, gaming, and several elements of environmental and industrial monitoring by researchers at SUNY, Buffalo and Georgia Tech. Testbeds allow the observation of the performance of the WMSN in a controlled environment. Hence, the effect of different types of inputs, physical operating conditions, and subjects for sensing can be studied, and the functioning of the devices in the testbed may be changed appropriately for accurate measurement. A few WMSNs developed are outlined below:

A visual sensor testbed was developed as part of the Meerkats project to measure the tradeoff between power efficiency and performance. Results revealed that there was significant energy consumption in keeping the camera active, and writing the image to a Flash memory followed by switching the camera off conserved energy. There was also a finite instantaneous increase in the energy consumption due to state transients. Researchers were also able to determine that the processing-intensive benchmark resulted in the highest current requirement, and transmission was shown to be only about 5% more energy-consuming than reception.

Expandable, vision-, and sensor-equipped wireless robots with MICA sensor motes for networking were designed in the Explorebots testbed architecture. The target localization experiments on the testbed, composed of these mobile robots, used on board multimedia sensors such as custom-designed velocity and distance sensors, motor movement control, an in-built magnetic two-axis compass, and sonic sensors. By processing the sound and light sensors outputs, the robots were guided towards the target source.

The Mobile Emulab network testbed provided a remotely accessible mobile wireless and sensor testbed. Robots carried motes and single-board computers through an indoor field of sensor-equipped motes. A remote user could position the robots, control all the computers and network interfaces, run arbitrary programs, and log data in a database. The path of robots, which was also equipped with Webcams, could be planned, and a vision-based system provided positioning information with an accuracy within 1 cm.

IrisNet (Internet-scale resource-intensive sensor network services) was an example software platform for a heterogeneous WMSN testbed. Video sensors and scalar sensors were spread throughout the environment and collected potentially useful data. IrisNet allowed users to perform Internet-like queries to video and scalar sensors that spread throughout the environment. The architecture of IrisNet was two-tiered: heterogeneous sensors implemented a common shared interface and were called sensing agents (SAs), while the data produced by sensors was stored in a distributed database that was implemented on organizing agents (OAs). Different sensing services were run simultaneously on the architecture. For example, a set of video sensors could provide a parking-space finder service, as well as a surveillance service.

In the design and implementation of SensEye, a multiple-tier network of heterogeneous wireless nodes and cameras, was created to test surveillance applications. Each tier comprised nodes equipped with similar cameras and processing ability, with increasing resolution and performance at each stage. The lowest tier consisted of low end devices, i.e., MICA2 Motes equipped with 900 MHz radios interfaced with scalar sensors, e.g., vibration sensors. The second tier was made up of motes equipped with low-fidelity Cyclops or CMUcam camera sensors. The third tier consisted of Stargate nodes equipped with Webcams that could capture higher fidelity images than tier 2 cameras. Tier 3 nodes also performed gateway functions, as they were endowed with a low-data-rate radio to communicate with motes in tiers 1–2.The aim was to efficiently undertake object detection, recognition and tracking by triggering a higher tie into the active state based on a need basis.

The WMSN-testbed at the Broadband Wireless Networking (BWN) Laboratory at Georgia Tech was based on commercial off-the-shelf advanced devices and had been built to demonstrate the efficiency of algorithms and protocols for multimedia communications through wireless sensor networks. The testbed was integrated with the scalar sensor network testbed, which was composed of a heterogeneous collection of Imote and MICAz motes from Crossbow. The testbed allowed the integration of heterogeneous devices in experimental testbeds and some succesful examples in developing APIs and system software for WMSNs.

These are just a few of the various wireless sensor network testbeds found worldwide. Crossbow's vast portfolio of wireless sensor platforms provides researchers and government/commercial users with the equipment they need to set up a lab for their wireless sensor course or to verify their specifications prior to real world deployment of their wireless sensor network. For information on how to set up your own WSN testbed or for details on Crossbow's wireless sensor network platforms, contact sales@xbow.com.

Robocopters and Motes

Crossbow's Motes were featured last month in an article on IEEE Spectrum. The application featured showcases how the Motes can be used when deploying mobile distributed communications networks.

The meter-long helicopters lined up under the fluorescent lab lights at the Berlin Technical University might look like overgrown toys, but they’ve got a little more under the hood. These are flying robots. They take off, land, and scout terrain autonomously and are being wired to deploy ad hoc communications sensor networks. And unlike any other robocopters, they can work together.

Researchers expect they’ll be used to distribute sensors that would help coordinate firefighting efforts or search flood zones, to track or find people and vehicles, or to shoot movies and cover sports events. Hoisting communications gear, they could one day help channel radio, Wi-Fi, or mobile phone traffic where infrastructure has been wiped out by an earthquake or other natural disaster.

Several groups around the world are working on miniaturized robot helicopters with advanced intelligence, notably in California, South Carolina, the Netherlands, South Korea, and the UK. But the Berlin team believes it is the first to write software and build systems that get multiple robot copters to collaborate. The project brings together a half-dozen institutions and companies from across Europe.

The copters’ control systems allow small craft to work together in lifting loads and scouting environments. Coordinated, the copters can lift weights that would normally require larger, exponentially more expensive machines. Estonian robotics engineer Konstantin Kondak, a professor at TU Berlin and one of the project’s leaders, says that having three or four copters in the air, each sharing the load while tethered by a rope to a single object, creates too many contrary forces for a set of human pilots to handle: “If you try to do this flying manually, it is not a stable system. You have to correct at all times; it’s too much.” But autonomous robots, making instant and coordinated adjustments, can do the job, he says.

Each robot must account for the location of the other helicopters, the forces coming from them, and the load on the rope, to jointly lift something. The helicopters’ coordination comes from a system that integrates four software modules for stabilizing the copter: one for navigation, one for exploration, one for obstacle avoidance, and one for processing orientation, horizon, and position.

The robocopters are good for much more than just lugging things around. Project manager Aníbal Ollero, a professor of engineering and automated systems at the University of Seville, in Spain, says that a flexible, easy-to-transport team of choppers makes for more efficient scouting because they automatically divide an area among themselves.

They’re also faster at another important task: deploying distributed communications networks by dropping off sets of tiny sensor nodes. These nodes combine a data processor, a radio, a battery, and—depending on what needs measuring—temperature, light, radiation, location, or chemical sensors. For the autocopter project, off-the-shelf nodes from wireless-sensor firms Crossbow Technology and Ambient Systems were optimized and linked by data-routing experts at universities in Stuttgart, Germany, and Twente, Netherlands. Just a few centimeters across and 7 millimeters thick, the individual nodes transmit over a range of just 25 meters, but as a network they pass radio messages to one another to get to a central unit (or hovering robocopter). Hundreds of thousands of these nodes could be distributed by robot to survey a forest fire or flood zone for rescue efforts, according to the researchers.

Final trials for the project get under way, far from the Berlin winter—this spring in southern Spain, Ollero says. If all goes well, helicopters will deploy a sensor network, track mobile objects and people, follow movement inside and outside of buildings, and capture it all with high-end airborne cameras.

For more information on Crossbow's Mote platforms, visit www.xbow.com.

Sensors Help Keep the Elderly Safe, and at Home

The New York Times published a front page story regarding how sensor technology is changing the face of home health care. The article discussed how increasingly, many older people who live alone are not truly alone. They are being watched by a flurry of new technologies designed to enable them to live independently and avoid expensive trips to the emergency room or nursing homes.

Crossbow's wireless sensor network technology has been used in a plethora of various research and project deployments on the capabilities of integrating wireless sensor network technology for elder care. Recently, researchers at Kalasalingam University in Nadu, India published their project details in the Jan/Feb Issue of Telemedicine and eHealth on using the IRIS and Imote2 platforms for home health monitoring. The issue they address is real as the increasing demand on public health care due to the aging population has become a major problem in developed countries. With the increasing number of elders relying on home care, better monitoring and analysis systems are crucial for maintaining and improving the quality of life for the elder patients. The concept of health monitoring is advanced by which health parameters are automatically monitored at home without disturbing daily activities. The proposed system is a network that supports various wearable sensors and contains on-board general computing capabilities for individual event detection, alerts, and communications with various medical informatics services. The purpose of their system is to provide extended monitoring for elderly patients under drug therapy after infarction, data collection in some particular cases, and remote consultation for elderly people.

With the advancement in ubiquitous computing techniques, researchers at Kalasalingam University proposed this new system for health monitoring at home to assess the elderly peoples’ health status. The integration of sensing, information, and communication technologies allowed elderly people to be constantly monitored. Moreover, constant monitoring would increase early detection of adverse conditions and diseases in elderly patients, potentially saving more lives. The proposed healthcare system was built upon a global medical information system made up of three main components: (1) Various sensors of different types to monitor physiological signals of elderly patients, their environments, and their activities with sensor nodes kept in the patients’ home; (2) Sensor nodes to transmit the signal from sensors to central servers through a base station; and (3) Central server for management of a knowledge database related to patients and responsible for broadcasting messages and alarms to healthcare professionals and caretakers. The system proposed a technique for monitoring elderly patient status at home and detecting critical situations for the purpose of alerting the doctors as well as the caretakers. It consists of a front end, the patient station, and the server.

The Patient Station, consists of an IRIS (XM2110CA) sensor node, Crossbow's newest 2.4GHz Mote platform for ultra low-power, long-range wireless sensor networking that receives information from the physiological sensors. The 3D camera kept at home was connected with the Imote2 platform (IPR2400CA) to visually monitor the elderly patient in the home environment in addition to the physiological signals. The Imote2 sensor node is aimed at applications involving data-rich computations, where there is a need for both high performance and high bandwidth, which require greater processing capability and low-power operation with a low duty cycle to achieve longer battery life. Sensor nodes are responsible for sensing as well as the first stage of sensory data processing in the data communication. The received signal from the patient station was transmitted to the central server for analysis. Researchers found that the benefits of the IRIS mote included excellent radio frequency range, substantially lower sleep current, and double the program memory of other Mote offerings. By Integrating a high-performance, low-power PXA271 Intel processor and an 802.15.4 radio with a built-in 2.4-GHz antenna, the Imote2 provided a platform for digital imaging applications.

Researchers placed sensor nodes equipped with flex sensors on the chest for ECG, and on the right hand for heart rate and acceleration measurement. The IRIS sensor node placed on the body was responsible for collecting physiological data and movement data from the sensors and transmitting it to the central servers through the aggregation node. The aggregation sensor nodes do not act merely as data collecting and forwarding points. Instead, they make decisions whether the information should be stored for future use, relayed as they are, or modified by applying computation and aggregation with other data.

The server, which is the core processing element, received the patient’s data from the patient station through the base station and stored the data into the patient database, while performing long-term trend analyses and prediction. It dispatches the critical events detected by sensor nodes to healthcare professionals. Moreover, it coordinates and controls the overall functionality of the system. This system can also give the alert to the doctors via a personal digital assistant (PDA) or cell phone. The sensor nodes could be programmed to awaken the node whenever an abnormal signal is detected and transmit the data to the server and then return to sleep mode. When an abnormality was detected in the sensor node, it would automatically turn on and transmit the signal to the central server and simultaneously alert the caretaker near the patient. The server, which is the core processing element, received the data regularly from the sensor nodes for analysis. The analysis was done using Crossbow's MoteView, and operates under TinyOS, which offers a built-in library for data acquisition, processing, analysis, and display.

The central servers were programmed with two algorithms. First was the threshold based algorithm, which attempted to identify the physiological parameter values that were potentially harmful or indicative of immediate danger to the patients. The algorithm detected the upper and lower threshold values from sensors output and alerted medical personnel and caretakers when the patient was not physically capable of requesting help. Second was the inactivity detection algorithm for detecting rapid movement or lack of movement of elder patients from accelerator output. The sensor node was programmed through the central server in such a way that if lack of movement/ action is detected, it awakened the Imote2 device connected to a 3-D camera fixed in that specific room to send the status of the elder patient to a central server. Upon detecting an anomalous event, both algorithms would sound an auditory alarm from the central server to emergency departments and alert the caretakers near the patients.

In this implementation, researchers at Kalasalingam University were able to connect two different systems, that is, the patient record database and the Web portal, through the use of well-defined Web services. Patient information was transmitted over SOAP, a secure and encrypted form of XML. The WSDL (Web Service Definition Language) for these Web services is published to a community of authorized users. This Web-service based approach for inter-system communication gives the system the flexibility to operate with third-party software in the future.The proposed system used a wireless sensor network technology within the residence in order to increase functionality, security, and quality of life.

As the Times put it, 'The future of these technologies, and the terabytes they gather, can involve unprecedented information about the whereabouts and well-being of older people.'

LiteOS v. 1.0 Released with Support for IRIS Mote Platform

In July of 2007, Crossbow Solutions featured the development of LiteOS by researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. LiteOS is a UNIX-like operating system that fits on memory-constrained devices like Crossbow's Mote platforms. This operating system allows users to operate wireless sensor networks like operating UNIX.

Version 1.0 of LiteOS has just been released. Now offering complete support for Crossbow's popular IRIS Mote platform, several new features have been implemented. Key Features in Version 1.0 include:

• Windows XP, Windows Vista and Linux Support
• Support for MICAz and IRIS nodes
• Plug-and play routing stack
• Extremely lightweight event logging
• Unix like commands to operate the entire sensor network
• Multi-threading kernel
• Write applications in C
• Native wireless reprogramming
• Built-in hierarchical file system
• Extensive development libraries
• Java tools to display and visualize data
• Online debugging support, including variable watches and unlimited number of breakpoints
• Elastic dynamic memory that has almost zero overhead
• Snapshot a thread state or restore it to a previous state
• Installer for quickly deploying the LiteOS operating system
• Documentation to quickly get started with operating and programming

The goal of LiteOS is to simplify sensor network programming. For more information on this OS, click here.

Inspired by Tesla, powered by Powercast

What forces drive us and keep us going? What energy do we need to power us on? Energy is often defined as the ability to do work or to cause change. Power is defined as the rate of doing work or the rate of using energy. Energy has always existed in one form or another, and sometimes in places we often overlook. While the world has focused on using radio waves for communication, Powercast has focused on capturing radio waves to power devices.

Founded in 2003, Powercast developed an RF energy harvesting module with breakthrough efficiency levels. Coupled with a transmitter that sends RF energy using algorithms developed by Powercast, the Powercast Wireless Power Platform™ was born. While the concept of sending power “through the air” has been discussed for more than 100 years, Powercast is the first company to make it commercially viable and harness energy in this form.

A Powercaster™ transmitter chip, running on conventional 110V pwer, broadcasts a low-power radio (RF) signal at a specific frequency across inches or tens of meters of free space. Powerharvester™ receivers built into one or more remote devices capture enough energy to continuously recharge batteries, or to power devices directly. Patented algorithms more than double the effective range of conventional RF power output. A patented receiver circuit design captures up to 70% of the theoretical maximum anywhere within the Powercaster’s range.

Powercast technology is designed for low power applications such as Crossbow's Mote platforms. Any device that uses a small battery (e.g. AAA, AA, coin cell, thin-film) or capacitors and and can be placed near a transmitter either continuously or even occasionally is a viable candidate. The radio energy received by the RF Powerharvester allows devices to be recharged even when not plugged into or docked with a charger.

During a recent visit to Crossbow Technology, Powercast representatives Charlie Greene (Chief Scientist) and Harry Ostaffe (Director of Marketing) demonstrated how Crossbow's popular IRIS Mote platform benefits from this type of power source (operating the IRIS Mote without batteries using RF energy at 900MHz). With its low power, low data rate design, the IRIS Mote is a perfect candidate for Powercast RF energy harvesting technology to harness the power sent via radio energy to extend its battery life through wireless recharging, essentially providing perpetual, lifetime power.

Powercast believes that repeated battery replacements is a major impediment to enabling wireless sensor networks to scale to hundreds or thousands of nodes and view their wireless power technology as the solution. Powercast is now leading the cross-industry initiative to bring wireless power to a hundreds of low power devices including wireless sensors. Powercast's  FCC approved technology has been supplying commercial products within the United States since the end of 2007.

Powercast is dedicated to provide RF energy harvesting and wireless power solutions that deliver milliWatts over tens of meters, Watts over centimeters. In comparison to other alternative energy technologies, Powercast accomplishes power transmission in a unique manner.  Unlike pure ambient energy harvesting technologies like Piezo, solar or kinetic power, Powercast technology can be “always on”, or used in an on-demand or scheduled manner. Additionally, Powercast has the ability to deliver power through walls, ceilings and surfaces (rubber, plastic, plaster and wood).

For more information on this exciting new technology, visit Powercast here.

San Francisco Chronicle Features Crossbow's eKo System

Crossbow's eKo system has triggered an agricultural revolution in the world of precision agriculture and environmental monitoring. This cutting edge system was recently featured in the San Francisco Chronicle and the story can be viewed here.

(08-31) 15:50 PDT -- On a rolling hillside planted with row upon row of Cabernet grapes, viticulturist Jason Cole waxes eloquent about the elusive notion of 'terroir,' a term French farmers use to describe the 'je ne sais quoi' of crops harvested in any given locale.

"Grapes, chocolates, coffee, these are all incredibly good at soaking up their environments and spitting them out in their fruits," said Cole, who oversees the preening and pampering of more than 500 acres of vines planted at the Stagecoach Vineyard in Napa County.

That vineyard is a test bed for a new wireless sensing technology that measures soil wetness, wind speed, temperature and humidity to take the statistical pulse of the vineyard's microclimates to help determine how often and how much to irrigate. The system being tested at Stagecoach was developed by Crossbow Technology, a privately held, 90-person San Jose company that has created inertial guidance sensors for the aviation industry and researched the use of wireless sensor networks for the federal Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Other manufacturers of microclimate sensing systems include the Austrian company Adcon Telemetry, as well as Ranch Systems of Novato and Grape Networks of San Ramon.

The sensors that Cole is using at Stagecoach Vineyard represent one manifestation of a broader phenomenon called precision agriculture - the attempt to tailor the cultivation of large stretches of land so that the smallest possible subsection of a farm gets special but automated attention. In the Midwest, with its amber waves of grain, precision agriculture has been synonymous with huge tractors equipped with global positioning systems to keep the rows straight, for instance. But in California, the land of fruits, nuts and other specialty crops, precision agriculture has been expressed in technologies such as Cole's efforts to use wireless sensors to compute 'terroir.'

"The way that growers for many years decided whether it was time to water was they stuck their thumb in the ground," said Robert Robinson, vice president for Crossbow's wireless sensor division.

The basic field kit that Crossbow released earlier this year, priced at $3,359, consists of three sensing nodes that feed data collected in the field through an electronic gateway into what is essentially a Web page that can be viewed from any Internet-connected device. Crossbow says that basic configuration can divine the microclimate of sites as varied as a 4-acre plot of land in hilly and varied terrains such as Napa and 20 acres in the flatter, homogeneous Central Valley. Additional kits can extend the sensing network, wirelessly and indefinitely, over hill and dale.

Moisture sensors
Kneeling alongside a vine at Stagecoach Vineyard, Cole explained how the system, in addition to measuring temperature and humidity with above-ground sensors, sticks a virtual thumb deep into the soil in the form of two moisture sensors, one at a depth of 1 foot and the other at 3 feet.



"The whole point is to monitor what the roots are experiencing," Cole said. "Watering grapes is one of the most important factors to wine quality. You want to stress the vines in order to condense the flavor into smaller berries."

UC Davis Professor Stu Pettygrove, a soil specialist who has tracked precision agriculture in California, said the water-sensitivity of wine grapes, coupled with their high value relative to other agriculture products, make them a good candidate for this high-tech approach. But how many other California crops fit that description? Pistachios were the only other example Pettygrove offered. He said water-stinginess at just the right point helps burst the shells, making pistachios easy to eat.

Tree crops experiment
Professor Michael Delwiche, chairman of biological and cultural engineering at UC Davis, has experimented with wireless sensing systems that precisely apply water - sometimes mixed with chemical fertilizers in a process called fertigation - to tree crops like nectarines. So far, however, the cost benefit is not there in production orchards, he said.

Delwiche said wireless sensing systems and precision watering might find a home in commercial nurseries and flower-growing greenhouses, where the impetus is not purely economic - as measured by greater crop value - so much as it is regulatory. "They are under environmental regulation not to have runoff from the nursery location," Delwiche said. Eventually, manufacturers will try to improve the performance and bring down costs to encourage broader adoption of wireless sensing systems, he said. Meanwhile, the technology remains economical in niche markets - or exceptionally arid locales.

"In Israel, where water is so dear and they have the technological infrastructure, they're doing a lot of work in this area," Delwiche said. But at Stagecoach Vineyard, where cachet is central to the business plan, the cost of wireless sensing technology is hardly a barrier to the pursuit of quality.

"We're trying to grasp the 'terroir', but you'll always be grasping, you'll never have it all," Cole said.

For more information on the eKo system, visit the eKo site here.

An ēKo-nomic solution for Nursery Monitoring

If you took a look at the plants in my yard, or had caught a glimpse of the few potted plants I attempted to care for in college it would be quite obvious that my thumbs are not green. The soil would usually be too wet or too dry and the leaves wilted leading to my plant's eventual demise. Imagine having acres and acres of plants to monitor and care for...is there a way to do this ēKo-nomically?

The FLOW-AID project is working to contribute to the sustainability of irrigated agriculture by developing, testing in relevant conditions, and fine-tuning through feedback, an irrigation management system that can be used at farm level in situations where there is limited water supply and water quality. The FLOW-AID project in collaboration with the University of Pisa has installed an ēKo system at an experimental nursery in Tuscany, Italy to monitor soil moisture at eight different locations in the nursery.

The system is designed to serve as an assistant for communication with higher level water management systems at basin scale for long and short term water use planning and prediction. This project integrates innovative sensor technologies into a decision support system for irrigation management while taking into consideration several factors in a number of third country partners. The ēKo nodes have been deployed in eight locations over the nursery in Tuscany. The ēKo ES1101 soil moisture sensors are monitoring the ornamental shrubs and trees being grown to make sure that all the water is being used efficiently and effectively.

The project results yielded will showcase the development and testing of new and innovative, but simple and affordable, technical concepts for irrigation under deficit conditions used at the farm level in a large variety of set-ups and constraints. It will show the development of a water management support system (DSS) that contains an expert system (off-line/long-term) to assist in farm zoning and crop plan in view of expected water availability (amount and quality) with a link to Basin Management, as well as a crop response module that can be incorporated into the irrigation scheduler that allocates available water(s) among several plots and schedules irrigation for each one with a link to Basin Management.

The FLOW-AID project has set up four test sites in various market conditions with different irrigation structures, crop types, local water supplies and constraints. The hardware/software systems used must adapt the general concept of water management to the local situation by using appropriate parts of it at the global sites in Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and Italy.

The information being collected at the site in Tuscany, Italy, by the researchers at the University of Pisa for container crops and nursery grown crops is available to users over the internet via ēKo's EG2100 gateway device and the ēKoView interface. This device provides, in a fully integrated package the connection between ēKo Sensor Nodes deployed and the ēKo Gateway. The work done by FLOW-AID will be carried out between 2006 and 2009 as a 6th Framework European project under the call for water in agriculture, new systems and technologies for irrigation and drainage. For more information on the ēKo system, click here.