Antenna development for wearable wireless sensing systems

Embedded wireless sensor network (WSN) systems have been developed and used in a wide variety of applications such as local automatic environmental monitoring; medical applications analysing aspects of fitness and health energy metering and management in the built environment as well as traffic pattern analysis and control applications. While the purpose and functions of embedded wireless sensor networks have a myriad of applications and possibilities in the future, a particular implementation of these ambient sensors is in the area of wearable electronics incorporated into body area networks and everyday garments. Some of these systems will incorporate inertial sensing devices and other physical and physiological sensors with a particular focus on the application areas of athlete performance monitoring and e-health. Some of the important physical requirements for wearable antennas are that they are light-weight, small and robust and should also use materials that are compatible with a standard manufacturing process such as flexible polyimide or fr4 material where low cost consumer market oriented products are being produced. The substrate material is required to be low loss and flexible and often necessitates the use of thin dielectric and metallization layers. This paper describes the development of such a wearable, flexible antenna system for ISM band wearable wireless sensor networks. The material selected for the development of the wearable system in question is DE104i characterized by a dielectric constant of 3.8 and a loss tangent of 0.02. The antenna feed line is a 50 Ohm microstrip topology suitable for use with standard, high-performance and low-cost SMA-type RF connector technologies, widely used for these types of applications. The desired centre frequency is aimed at the 2.4GHz ISM band to be compatible with IEEE 802.15.4 Zigbee communication protocols and the Bluetooth standard which operate in this band.

Development of a highly-miniaturised wireless ISE/pH sensor

The goal of this work is to fabricate robust, highly-miniaturised, wireless sensor modules that incorporates ion-selective electrodes (ISEs). pH is one of the main parameters in assessment of the quality of our environment (water, soil) and these ISE/pH sensors will be deployed in a miniaturised, programmable modular system. The simplicity of ISEs (low costs and low power requirements) allow for the preparation of sensors that are all very similar in construction but can at the same time be easily made for variety of different environmentally important ions (i.e. heavy metals). This is important because of the increasing focus on the impact of the quality of the environment on society, both locally, and globally. The work described will contribute to a widely distributed sensor network for monitoring the quality of our environment, focused mainly on soil and water quality.

Market-oriented new product development of functional beverages

Strategic reviews of the Irish Food and Beverage Industry have consistently emphasised the need for food and beverage firms to improve their innovation and marketing capabilities, in order to maintain competitiveness in both domestic and overseas markets. In particular, the functional food and beverages market has been singled out as an extremely important emerging market, which Irish firms could benefit from through an increased technological and market orientation. Although health and wellness have been the most significant drivers of new product development (NPD) in recent years, failure rates for new functional foods and beverages have been reportedly high. In that context, researchers in the US, UK, Denmark and Ireland have reported a marked divergence between NPD practices within food and beverage firms and normative advice for successful product development. The high reported failure rates for new functional foods and beverages suggest a failure to manage customer knowledge effectively, as well as a lack of knowledge management between functional disciplines involved in the NPD process. This research explored the concept of managing customer knowledge at the early stages of the NPD process, and applied it to the development of a range of functional beverages, through the use of advanced concept optimisation research techniques, which provided for a more market-oriented approach to new food product development. A sequential exploratory research design strategy using mixed research methods was chosen for this study. First, the qualitative element of this research investigated customers’ choice motives for orange juice and soft drinks, and explored their attitudes and perceptions towards a range of new functional beverage concepts through a combination of 15 in-depth interviews and 3 focus groups. Second, the quantitative element of this research consisted of 3 conjoint-based questionnaires administered to 400 different customers in each study in order to model their purchase preferences for chilled nutrient-enriched and probiotic orange juices, and stimulant soft drinks. The in-depth interviews identified the key product design attributes that influenced customers’ choice motives for orange juice. The focus group discussions revealed that groups of customers were negative towards the addition of certain functional ingredients to natural foods and beverages. K-means cluster analysis was used to quantitatively identify segments of customers with similar preferences for chilled nutrient-enriched and probiotic orange juices, and stimulant soft drinks. Overall, advanced concept optimisation research methods facilitate the integration of the customer at the early stages of the NPD process, which promotes a multi-disciplinary approach to new food product design. This research illustrated how advanced concept optimisation research methods could contribute towards effective and efficient knowledge management in the new food product development process.

Development of miniaturized wireless sensor nodes suitable for building energy management and modelling

Buildings consume 40% of Ireland's total annual energy translating to 3.5 billion (2004). The EPBD directive (effective January 2003) places an onus on all member states to rate the energy performance of all buildings in excess of 50m2. Energy and environmental performance management systems for residential buildings do not exist and consist of an ad-hoc integration of wired building management systems and Monitoring & Targeting systems for non-residential buildings. These systems are unsophisticated and do not easily lend themselves to cost effective retrofit or integration with other enterprise management systems. It is commonly agreed that a 15-40% reduction of building energy consumption is achievable by efficiently operating buildings when compared with typical practice. Existing research has identified that the level of information available to Building Managers with existing Building Management Systems and Environmental Monitoring Systems (BMS/EMS) is insufficient to perform the required performance based building assessment. The cost of installing additional sensors and meters is extremely high, primarily due to the estimated cost of wiring and the needed labour. From this perspective wireless sensor technology provides the capability to provide reliable sensor data at the required temporal and spatial granularity associated with building energy management. In this paper, a wireless sensor network mote hardware design and implementation is presented for a building energy management application. Appropriate sensors were selected and interfaced with the developed system based on user requirements to meet both the building monitoring and metering requirements. Beside the sensing capability, actuation and interfacing to external meters/sensors are provided to perform different management control and data recording tasks associated with minimisation of energy consumption in the built environment and the development of appropriate Building information models(BIM)to enable the design and development of energy efficient spaces.