This Small Business Innovation Program (SBIR) Phase I project is to conduct a feasibility study for the development of wireless sensor network application for a personal healthcare product that monitors and gives feedback about sedentary work habits. This society is becoming increasingly aware of the toll current work environments have on the physical wellbeing. This project will be an unobtrusive embedded solution and desktop/mobile data analysis application to help people monitor their work patterns so that they can adjust their work environments appropriately. Wireless sensor networks are emerging as a new paradigm for connectivity, data retrieval and systems control for a range of applications from healthcare and environment monitoring to consumer products. This personal healthcare product and enabling technologies will provide the foundation for a wireless sensor network development environment that will be targeted to human centered computing researchers, designers, and manufacturers who need to develop medium to large-scale wireless sensor network projects and products, but do not have access to the engineering expertise that is required to develop such systems.
The broader impact/commercial potential of this project includes extending wireless sensor network technologies into new product domains of personal healthcare and consumer products. Manufactures, researchers, architects and designers have a growing need to use mesh wireless sensor networks to monitor and control complex built environments. Rather than use these technologies for passive monitoring of ambient environments, this project focuses on the human-in-the-loop as an integral component with the agency to change their environment for the betterment of their physical wellbeing. The technologies developed for a mixed-reality game application will be migrated into a robust, user friendly, affordable, and scalable solution for the original equipment manufacturer and business-to-business products and research projects.
NobleWIRE, LLC is a consumer electronics company that develops wireless sensor network technologies for products in education and research. A wireless sensor network is a cluster of embedded computers that can send sensor data to each other through a mesh network. A wireless sensor network can facilitate machine to machine (M2M) communication between hundreds and thousands of machines in spaces ranging from architectural structures to a city or rural landscape. During our NSF SBIR Phase 1 grant we began the transfer of our proprietary technologies, mechanical inventions, system architectures, and product design components developed for the "CONSTRUCTS™ electronic construction kit" to our "Wireless Sensor Network Design Toolkit". This work included updating and redesigning our complete system architecture from the firmware and hardware level to the computer user interface. The NSF SBIR Phase 1 work provides a foundation for the continued development of this product. Our company is founded on the belief that diversity in the perspective of designers working with new technologies will produce useful, valuable, and novel applications that impact how we live, work, and play. It will help to solve problems with well-rounded and thoughtful solutions. Our target product market includes post-secondary academic curriculum and research in disciplines ranging from human centered computing, computer science, engineering, interaction and industrial design, behavior sciences, biomechanics, architecture and the arts. All of these fields engage in product and project developments that require the collection of sensor data from multiple networked embedded computers. Our academic target market also includes post-secondary institutions that are focused on vocational training including community colleges and technical schools that train the 21st century workforce in advanced network technology methods and tools.
