Building an Adaptive Environmental Monitoring System Using Sensor Web Technology

Environmental pollution affects human health and reduces the quality of our land and water. As a result, there is great interest in monitoring water and air quality and ensuring that all areas are compliant with legislation. Ubiquitous environmental monitoring places considerable demands upon existing sensing technology. The combined challenges of system longevity, autonomous operation, robustness, large-scale sensor networks, operationally difficult deployments and unpredictable and lossy environments collectively represents a technological barrier that has yet to be overcome. The CLARITY Centre for Sensor Web Technologies is working with IBM to confront these challenges. Ubiquitous sensing envisages many aspects of our environment being routinely sensed. This will result in data streams from a large variety of heterogeneous sources, which will often vary in their volume and accuracy. The challenge is to develop a networked sensing infrastructure that can support the effective capture , filtering, aggregation and analysis of such data. This will ultimately enable us to dynamically monitor and track the quality of our environment at multiple locations. The ability to monitor quality is a prerequisite to maintaining quality, and ensures that detected pollution incidents are dealt with as quickly as possible , dramatically minimizing their impact. In effect, the ultimate goal of environmental sensor networks is to realize the concept of an 'adaptive envi-ronment' – one that senses and rapidly adapts to potential incidents to minimize their impact. In recent years an increasing number of environmental incidents have occurred which would have benefited from an adaptive environment approach. These include the detection of lead in water supplies, cryptosporidium outbreaks and, as recently reported by the Irish EPA, and high pollution levels in a third of Irish rivers and streams. In Ireland and the rest of the world, proper management of environmental resources is critical for both health reasons and for the sustainable exploitation of these resources. Sensor Web technology such as low-power wireless communications , coupled with the emergence of new and reliable sensors such as the microfluidic analyser platform developed by CLARITY (see Figure 1), now enable environmental data to be collected at much higher temporal and spatial resolutions. Other examples of sensors being developed by CLARITY researchers are very low-power and low-cost colorimetric sensors that can be fabricated by modifying commercial optical components with chromo-responsive films. For example, inexpensive yet sensitive chemo-sensors can be made by applying such coatings to light emitting diodes (LEDs), as shown in Figure 2. …