Many workers operate in environments that are inherently hazardous and that are subject to strict health and safety rules and regulations. We envisage a world in which physical work artefacts such as tools, are augmented with intelligent mobile nodes that are able to observe the working activities taking place, evaluate compliance with health and safety regulations and assist or actively enforce compliance with these regulations. This vision creates a new field of work in the area of health and safety aware intelligent mobile sensor networks. In this paper we describe a number of new challenges faced when developing mobile systems for compliance with health and safety regulations.@en

The importance in maintaining energy efficient communications in low power networks such as sensor and actuator networks is well understood. However, in recent years, a growing number of delay sensitive and interactive applications have been discovered for such networks, that are no longer purely limited to the data gathering model of sensor networks. Providing support application requiring low latency interaction in such environments without negatively affecting energy efficiency remains a challenging problem. This paper outlines the importance of this emerging class of application, discusses problems involved in supporting them in energy challenged environments, proposes a combined hardware and software mechanism based on heterogeneous wireless networking which works toward solving this problem, and goes on to evaluate this mechanism through experimental analysis. The paper concludes with a discussion of the applicability of the mechanism to typical application scenarios.@en

The NEMO project is exploring the use of mobile sensor nodes toaugment physical work artefacts in order to ensure compliance with health and safety regulations. In this paper we present our experiences of designing and deploying the NEMO Hand Arm Vibration (HAV) monitoring system. Long term exposure to hand arm vibration can lead to serious health conditions and the NEMO HAV monitoring system offers an integrated architecture for capturing HAV exposure data in the field, providing feedback about exposure levels both in the field and as input to a back-end database. Our design allows health and safety regulations specified at the enterprise level to be embedded within the wireless sensor nodes allowing them to operate without any infrastructural support. The system has been the subject of a two week field trial that took place with the collaboration of a British construction and maintenance company. During the field trial, the NEMO HAV system was deployed to a roa dmaintenance patching gang and data were collected on HAV exposure caused by hydraulic drills. The paper reports on the results of the field trial and the lessons learned through the real deployment of the system.@en

Accurately determining the location of devices is a key challenge in contextual smart sensing. This poster describes how IEEE 802.15.4 radios can be used for accurate proximity sensing of co-located devices. In particular, the effect of low noise amplifiers on the estimation accuracy are discussed.

@en