Designing a Wireless Sensors Network for Monitoring and Predicting Droughts

Global warming and lack of rain were the main problems that caused increased drought around the world. In New Zealand, according to National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) the drought in 2012 and 2013 was the worst drought in the last 70 years. Therefore, there is a need for technological intervention to monitor basic information about the weather and soil condition in order to identify and predict drought conditions. Initial experiments have shown that the proposed wireless sensor drought monitoring system is capable of remote real-time monitoring for extended periods. This monitoring can also help identify drought in the early stages and thereby indicate promptly when to take corrective measures. Intelligent sensors in a wireless network monitor the soil condition. These sensors collect various environmental parameters and then send the pre-processed data wirelessly to a base station. From the base station this data uploads every two seconds to the cloud (internet) for further analysis. If a drought condition is identified by the monitoring system then an alert message is sent to the user via text message or email

Designing a Wireless Sensors Network for Monitoring and Predicting Droughts

Global warming and lack of rain were the main problems that caused increased drought around the world. In New Zealand, according to National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) the drought in 2012 and 2013 was the worst drought in the last 70 years. Therefore, there is a need for technological intervention to monitor basic information about the weather and soil condition in order to identify and predict drought conditions. Initial experiments have shown that the proposed wireless sensor drought monitoring system is capable of remote real-time monitoring for extended periods. This monitoring can also help identify drought in the early stages and thereby indicate promptly when to take corrective measures. Intelligent sensors in a wireless network monitor the soil condition. These sensors collect various environmental parameters and then send the pre-processed data wirelessly to a base station. From the base station this data uploads every two seconds to the cloud (internet) for further analysis. If a drought condition is identified by the monitoring system then an alert message is sent to the user via text message or email

Sensors for Smart Homes

Sensors are increasingly being employed to determine different activities of a person living at home. Numerous sensors can be used to obtain a variety of information. While many sensors may be used to make a system, it is important to look into the availability, cost, installation, mechanism, and performance of sensors. This chapter investigates different sensors and their usefulness in a smart home monitoring system. A smart home monitoring system provides a safe, sound, and secure living environment for elderly people. Statistics show that the population of elderly people is increasing around the world and this trend is not going to change in the near future. The authors have developed a smart home that consists of an optimum number of wireless sensors that includes current flow, water flow, and bed usage sensors. The sensors provide information that can be used for monitoring elderly people by detecting abnormal patterns in their daily activities. The system generates and sends an early warning message to the caregiver when an unforeseen abnormal condition occurs

IoT and Wireless Sensor Network for Interactive Waka Structure

Partnership between technologists, engineers and artists often produces new forms of interactive and complex artworks. This paper discusses the role of a smart interactive art structure and reviews the novel ways in which it can serve the intended purpose. The interactive waka project is a multi-disciplinary project which involves in the production of an interactive six-meter-tall COR-TEN plate steel waka (traditional canoe) sculpture informed by Mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge) about the Matariki star cluster. (Pleiades). This smart interactive structure will be will be located besides the Waikato river in Hamilton, New Zealand. The waka sculpture as a smart structure serves several main interrelating purposes that are centred on its symbolic, architectonic, and interactive functions. The use of human and environmental monitoring will enable co-constitutive real-time interactions, which will themselves be performatively incorporated into the field of relations. All the information gathered from the wireless sensors will be sent to the cloud, where it will be processed to determine how the waka structure's light and sound patterns should behave. The waka structure will be self-contained in terms of power, using sustainable energy sources such as solar, and will not be active unless humans are present. Data collected through the environmental wireless sensors network will be publically available through a website, using an open-source platform and the smart interactive structure will be gifted to the City of Hamilton in New Zealand

Wireless sensor network based smart home for elder care : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Electronics Engineering at School of Engineering and Advanced Technology, Massey University, Manawatu Campus, New Zealand

The proportion of elderly people in any population is growing rapidly creating the need to increase geriatric care and this trend isn’t going to change in the near future. In New Zealand, the median age of the population is projected to rise from 36.6 in 2010 to 43.1 in 2050. This will put tremendous strain on national resources and the cost of elder care is only going to escalate. More and more elderly people are choosing to stay alone, independently, rather than in a retirement village or old people’s home. Such people, often frail and infirm, do however require constant monitoring so that medical help can be provided immediately in times of dire needs. Considerable research efforts have been focused towards in-home monitoring of elderly people, often using wireless personal area networks. As wireless sensing technology continues to evolve, it is playing an important role in improving the quality of life for elderly people and their families. Wireless sensors based smart home monitoring system provides a safe, sound and secure living environment for the elderly people. A wireless sensors based smart home consists of number of wireless sensors that provide information. The information from the sensors can be used for monitoring elderly people by detecting their abnormal patterns in their daily activities and picking up any unforeseen abnormal condition when occurs. The thesis is focused on research and developmental issues of an intelligent wireless sensors based smart home and determination of person’s daily activities based on the usage of different appliances. The daily pattern can then be compared to determine the early signs of behavioural pattern change of elderly, which can potentially allow for early medical intervention. While several sensors are readily available off the shelf, making them “intelligent” in the context of a specific application (such as monitoring of the elderly) is always a challenging task. We have developed a framework, dealing with the design intricacies and implementation issues of novel sensors, targeted to achieve a Digital Home specifically for the elderly. This smart home monitoring may circumvent institutionalizing the older persons and can help them live at home in safety and independence. The design methodology is on the impediments in designing, implementing and testing a wireless sensor network based smart home for monitoring the elderly and to propose an optimal solution to circumvent the impediments. The smart home is based on a few smart and iii intelligent sensors, which are developed, fabricated and configured around a wireless ad-hoc network. The system will generate early warning message to care giver, when an unforeseen abnormal condition occurs. It will also, analyse gathered data to determine resident behaviour using optimal number of intelligent sensors. In general terms intelligent sensors, i.e., sensing devices having intelligent aspects, can be considered as an extension of conventional sensors with advanced learning and adaptation capabilities. The developed monitoring system is used to recognize activities of daily living and life style of elderly person living alone. Even though the monitoring system uses a limited number of sensors, it determines the daily behaviour of the person. The system was installed in residential environments with ease. Moreover, the proposed sensing system presents an alternative to sensors that are perceived by most people as invasive such as cameras and microphones, making the sensors are almost invisible to the user thereby increasing the acceptance level to use the system in a household environment. The results obtained from this research demonstrate the feasibility to build a system based on wireless sensors, to identify, and possible to distinguish between normal and abnormal situation of an elderly person living alone in a home

Detecting Sensor Faults, Anomalies and Outliers in the Internet of Things: A Survey on the Challenges and Solutions

The Internet of Things (IoT) has gained significant recognition to become a novel sensing paradigm to interact with the physical world in this Industry 4.0 era. The IoTs are being used in many diverse applications that are part of our life and is growing to become the global digital nervous systems. It is quite evident that in the near future, hundreds of millions of individuals and businesses with billions will have smart-sensors and advanced communication technology, and these things will expand the boundaries of current systems. This will result in a potential change in the way we work, learn, innovate, live and entertain. The heterogeneous smart sensors within the Internet of Things are indispensable parts, which capture the raw data from the physical world by being the first port of contact. Often the sensors within the IoT are deployed or installed in harsh environments. This inevitably means that the sensors are prone to failure, malfunction, rapid attrition, malicious attacks, theft and tampering. All of these conditions cause the sensors within the IoT to produce unusual and erroneous readings, often known as outliers. Much of the current research has been done in developing the sensor outlier and fault detection models exclusively for the Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), and adequate research has not been done so far in the context of the IoT. Wireless sensor network’s operational framework differ greatly when compared to IoT’s operational framework, using some of the existing models developed for WSN cannot be used on IoT’s for detecting outliers and faults. Sensor faults and outlier detection is very crucial in the IoT to detect the high probability of erroneous reading or data corruption, thereby ensuring the quality of the data collected by sensors. The data collected by sensors are initially pre-processed to be transformed into information and when Artificially Intelligent (AI), Machine Learning (ML) models are further used by the IoT, the information is further processed into applications and processes. Any faulty, erroneous, corrupted sensor readings corrupt the trained models, which thereby produces abnormal processes or outliers that are significantly distinct from the normal behavioural processes of a system. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of the detecting sensor faults, anomalies, outliers in the Internet of Things and the challenges. A comprehensive guideline to select an adequate outlier detection model for the sensors in the IoT context for various applications is discussed