Introduction - Energy Harvesting Autonomous Sensor Systems - page 10

Medical and Health Monitoring

Structure Health Monitoring

Reference: Progressive Sports Technologies

Smart Building

Wireless Sensor Networks (Indoor)

Reference: Texas Instruments

FIGURE 1.8
Examples of WSN application areas.

monitoring where pervasive computing devices are deployed to detect for any
damage in buildings, bridges, ships, and aircraft [15]. The most dramatic ap-
plications fall under the third classification; these involve monitoring complex
interactions, including wildlife habitats, disaster management, emergency re-
sponse, asset tracking, and manufacturing process flow. A summary of these
applications is shown in Figure 1.8 .
More of these WSN applications are likely to emerge as electronic hardware
circuitries become cheaper and smaller, and these miniaturized wireless sen-
sor nodes offer the opportunity for electronic systems to be completely con-
nected, intuitive, effortlessly portable, constantly available, and embedded
unobtrusively and pervasively into everyday objects to attain a deploy-and-
forget scenario.

1.1.3 Wireless Sensor Nodes of WSNs

The WSNs, based on the collaborative efforts of a large number of sensor
nodes distributed throughout an area of interest, have been proven by many
researchers as good candidates to provide economically viable solutions for
a wide range of applications. These sensor nodes are coordinated based on
some network topologies to cooperate with one another within the WSNs
to satisfy the application requirements. Each sensor node monitors its local
environment, locally processing and storing the collected data so that other