Equipment used in the construction domain is often hired in order to reduce cost and maintenance overhead. The cost of hire is dependent on the time period involved and does not take into account the actual use equipment has received. This paper presents our initial investigation into how physical objects augmented with sensing and communication technologies can measure use in order to enable new pay-per-use payment models for equipment hire. We also explore user interaction with pay-per-use objects via mobile devices. The user interactions that take place within our prototype scenario range from simple information access to transactions involving multiple users. This paper presents the design, implementation and evaluation of a prototype pay-per-use system motivated by a real world equipment hire scenario. We also provide insights into the various challenges introduced by supporting a pay-per-use model, including data storage and data security in addition to user interaction issues.

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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

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

Industrial health and safety is an important yet largely unexplored application area of ubiquitous computing. In this paper we investigate the relationship between technology and organization in the context of a concrete industrial health and safety system. The system is designed to reduce the number of incidents of "vibration white finger" (VWF) at construction sites and uses wireless sensor nodes for monitoring workers' exposure to vibrations and testing of compliance with legal health and safety regulations. In particular we investigate the impact of this ubiquitous technology on the relationship between management and operatives, the formulation of health and safety rules and the risk perception and risk behavior of operatives. In addition, we contrast sensor-network inspired and smart artifact inspired compliance systems, and make the case that these technology models have a strong influence on the linkage between technology and organization.

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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