Self-Powered, maintenance-free wireless sensor network with location tracking and health monitoring sensor interface

Monitoring of remotely deployed installations is an expensive and challenging task involving potential risk for unsupervised personnel working in inaccessible locations. To this end, Adigy Canada Inc. is developing an innovative wireless network that is characterized by completely maintenance-free operation, provision of interface for health monitoring wireless wearable sensors, localization of subjects, and an intrusion sensor interface. Deployment of such system in any location will be inexpensive and will permit to cut not only the operational cost of monitoring, but also will reduce the risk linked with management of medical problems in unsupervised and remotely deployed personnel. Up to now, no such system exists due to its interdisciplinary nature and technical challenges. Expertise from networking, energy harvesting and health monitoring has to be put together to design an effective system. The team composed of Adigy employees and MITACS interns will work on building a robust wireless mesh network that can be dynamically reconfigured to accommodate possible failures or extreme weather conditions with no user interaction. Furthermore, the team will explore different environmental powering options leading to eliminating the necessity of battery replacement. A novel localization method using radio signal strength will be implemented within the network as well. Finally, the project aims at creation of Internet interface for sensor data display and remote system maintenance including monitoring of energy resources, over-the-air (OTA) firmware update and selective node activation.

Faculty Supervisor:

Dr. Bozena Kaminska

Student:

Marcin Marzencki, Camille Jaggernauth, Yang Ding, BennyHung, Philip Lin

Partner:

Adigy Inc.

Discipline:

Statistics / Actuarial sciences

Sector:

Information and communications technologies

University:

Simon Fraser University