Introducing Contextual Information

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Introducing Contextual Information
to Mobile Phones by External and Embedded Sensor
s
St. Louis, MO April 21 2008
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Denmark?!?!?!
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Outline

• Wireless sensor networks
• Convergence of WSN and mobile phones
• Opensensor platform
• Example of applications

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Wireless Sensor Networks

• Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are currently an
  interesting research area
  
• WSN consists out of many, sometime even thousands
  of sensors
  
• Sensor
• small electronic system
• battery driven
• wireless communication capabilities
• sensory part (e.g. temperature, light, and many
  others)
  

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Wireless Sensor Networks

• Field of application for WSN
• Military (main source)
• Intelligent households
• Environmental scenarios
• In-Car communication
• Gaming
• Health Care
• .

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Wireless Sensor Networks

• Research areas for WSN
• Routing
• Protocol design
• Communication architectures
• Energy efficient operations
• Security
• Information storage

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WSN and mobile phones

• One problem of WSN is the interface to users
• No display
• battery constraints
• sometimes it just doesnt make sense to have
  displays.
  

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WSN and mobile phones

• Billions of sensors are already out there
• How do we convey the information to users?

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WSN and mobile phones

• The convergence of mobile phones and WSN has
  already started!!!
  
• Integrated sensors
• External sensors

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Integrated sensors

• Nokia 5500
• 3D motion sensor chip embedded
• Exercise application (step counter)
• Enrich the game experience (turn your phone into
  a virtual fishing rod)

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Integrated sensors

• New applications for integrated sensors in mobile
  phones
  
• Derive overall traffic flow for a whole city by
  partial measurements of some phones (e.g. N95
  with GPS)

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External sensors

• External sensors are available too
• not optimized for the communication with the
  mobile phone
  
• way to expensive
• low flexibility

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External sensors example

• External sensors
• Jogging equipment for iPod from Nike
• External sensor placed in the shoe
• Step counter conveys information to the iPod
• No flexibility!!!!

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Opensensor
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Motivation for the opensensor

• The main motivation to build the opensensor
• have a wireless sensor board with the following
  characteristics
  
• Low cost and easy to build/extend
• Get the basic understanding of DSPs and their
  programming
  
• Build solid teaching material
• Easy extendible with sensory parts
• Fully programmable
• Test new WSN algorithms directly on board
• Not just WSN, but convergence with mobile phones

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Motivation for the opensensor

• The opensensor is available for all researcher
  around the world
  
• Hardware The plans to build the opensensor are
  freely available
  
• Software Basic functionality is offered already
  and maintain in the future
  
• Teaching All slides are available, so that it
  should be easy to integrated it into existing
  lectures or to build course from scratch

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Opensensor interfaces

• Serial interface
• Opensensor debug and test
• SPI (nRF905) interface
• Bluetooth interface

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Two approaches
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Mutual benefit

• Opensensor can enrich the mobile devices with new
  services
  
• Sensing the environment around the user

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Mutual benefit

• Wireless sensors have nearly no or limited
  interface for human interaction
  

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Mutual benefit

• Mobile phones can provide
• Human Interface
• Large and colored display
• Alarm sounds
• Text to speech capabilities
• Network interface
• SMS,MMS
• GPRS, 3G

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Application example Temperature monitoring

• Temperature monitoring
• Python implementation
• Example
• SMS
• Warning!!!Temperature 41 C
• 1233456789

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Application example parksensor
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Application example Light sensor

• Light sensor application
• The opensensor measures the light level and sends
  data back to the phone

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How to get an opensensor

• Order components from us
• Note, you need to solder the pieces together by
  yourself!!
  
• Documentation available on the web
• How to build it
• How to program it
• How to test it
• Code example
• Opensensor
• Mobile phones

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Contacts and acknowledgements