Title: Augmented materials: spatially embodied sensor networks

Authors: M.A. Razzaque; Simon Dobson; Kieran Delaney

Addresses: Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Computing, UTM, Skudai, 81310, Johor Bahru, Malaysia ' School of Computer Science, University of St. Andrews, Jack Cole Building, North Haugh, St. Andrews, Fife KY16 9SX, Scotland, UK ' Cork Institute of Technology, B285, Nimbus Centre, Rossa Avenue, Cork IE, Ireland

Abstract: Wireless sensor networks are increasingly common in medical, environmental monitoring, precision agriculture, smart home monitoring, and other applications. Most wireless sensor networks operate in air or liquid media: in this paper we are concerned with the design and implementation of sensor networks embedded into solid materials, thus placing sensing and processing capabilities into the fabric of built objects and environments. We introduce the concept and its component challenges, and present some early work demonstrating the feasibility of such 'augmented' materials to provide semantically rich sensing and response.

Keywords: augmented materials; smart materials; smart objects; wireless sensor networks; WSNs; distributed computing; near field communication; embedded systems.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCNDS.2013.057721

International Journal of Communication Networks and Distributed Systems, 2013 Vol.11 No.4, pp.453 - 477

Received: 06 May 2012
Accepted: 24 Mar 2013
Published online: 28 Feb 2014 *

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