Elderly care
Unobtrusive monitoring of individual elderly persons to improve personalized support in semi independent living settings.
Sixth Framework Programme · Embedded Systems
Wireless Accessible Sensor Populations
WASP brought together researchers, hardware makers and end users to turn wireless sensor networks into solutions that people and enterprises could genuinely adopt, from elderly care to dairy farming and automotive sensing.
Project summary
Why WASP existed
For several decades, wireless sensor networks promised a new generation of applications. Turning that promise into adoption demanded a shared language between technical research and the practical needs of enterprises and end users.
Main objective
Wireless Sensor Networks have attracted a lot of interest as they could enable a wide range of novel applications and business propositions. Yet, despite promising research results and improved hardware offerings, industry remained reluctant to adopt WSN solutions for commercial deployments. To a large extent this was due to a mismatch between technical research results and practical enterprise needs, such as sufficient evidence of successful WSN usage and cost efficient solutions for WSN development, maintenance and integration in enterprise information systems.
The WASP project aimed to facilitate WSN adoption by bringing together relevant stakeholders from different disciplines, each with their own professional vocabulary and skills, to derive generic and therefore cost efficient solutions, and to demonstrate their use in real life, application optimized prototypical deployments.
An application driven approach
WASP activities were driven by application needs within three distinctly different domains, selected for their societal relevance and their potential benefit from WSN based solutions. The first domain is elderly care where, driven by an ageing society, cost efficient solutions are desired to unobtrusively monitor individual elderly persons and thereby improve personalized support in semi independent living settings.
In livestock farming, the interest in automated WSN based solutions to monitor individual animals is driven by the trend towards larger farm sizes, expected for example in dairy farms in response to the abandonment of the EU milk quota system in 2015. In automotive applications, the rapid development of new in vehicle sensor applications calls for wireless solutions that avoid the cost, weight and freedom of placement problems faced by wired solutions.
Livestock farming
Automated monitoring of individual animals as farms grow, with dairy claw health detection as a central test case.
Automotive
Wireless in vehicle sensing that frees applications from the cost, weight and placement limits of wired solutions.
System view
From sensor nodes to enterprise applications
The WASP system covers the complete chain from wireless sensor nodes up to remote enterprise applications, with the WASP gateway at its centre.
The WASP gateway
The WASP gateway makes WSN services, running on the wireless sensor nodes, accessible to remote enterprise applications through a set of web services. These web services decouple enterprise and embedded applications and let the developers of both work independently, as long as they keep to the interfaces defined by those services. In this manner the gateway makes it much easier to develop application optimized solutions.
The gateway also makes WSN services accessible directly using low power WASP network solutions, or indirectly through IP based connections over WLAN or GPRS. This extends WSN coverage for indoor and outdoor settings alike.
Integration choices
State of the art sensor nodes were used with light weight embedded solutions selected for their tightly constrained resources. A generic mediation layer between remote enterprise systems and the WASP gateway provides data base like functionality, while a healthcare specific mediation layer enables OpenEHR and HL7 compliant interfacing with professional Healthcare Information Systems.
Results
Integration and exploration
Main integration results
Successful demonstrations of the integrated WASP system were achieved for a large scale livestock deployment with 79 nodes tuned for claw health detection, and for a medium scale deployment showcasing elderly care scenarios through a professional Healthcare Information System. The integrated system is well suited as a research tool for animal and human behaviour scientists, enabling data acquisition over periods of several weeks.
Explorative results
Beyond integration, explorative activities advanced the WSN field and assessed future candidates for system integration. Examples include the ReISC microcontroller and biomedical optimized prototype ICs, software platform solutions such as a blackboard, an extra functional framework and code generation tools, and an alternative all IP implementation of the WASP system.
Testbeds and demos
Tested in real settings
WASP pursued real life test bed deployments in a dairy test farm in Lelystad, The Netherlands, and in the elderly care test bed at Imperial College London, United Kingdom.
Latest news
From the news archive
18/11/2010
Sensors reach a football stadium
As part of the internal transfer of WASP results, SAP Research began deploying WSNs into the Rhein Neckar Arena in Germany together with its Public Security unit.
05/02/2010
A startup cofounded by consortium members
Sensorscope, an EPFL spinoff cofounded by WASP consortium members, uses part of the EPFL technology on GPRS gateways in both its own solutions and in WASP.
Dissemination and exploitation
Results shared beyond the project
To stimulate further developments of WASP results, a WASP public SVN project and an accompanying WASP Development Handbook were made available to interested third parties. Various parts were disseminated to existing open source communities, and a list of journal and conference publications can be found through the project outputs.
Project management
Who delivered WASP
WASP ran from September 2006 to October 2010 as a European project under contract IST 034963, coordinated through CEFRIEL, the ICT Institute of Politecnico di Milano. Consortium partners came from France, Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Italy.