The recent issue about Sensor Networks and Applications in Proceedings of the IEEE, a general interest journal in electrical engineering and computer science discusses about the a network more powerful than the Internet, while perhaps inconceivable right now, is just one of many potentially life-changing applications for wireless sensor networks (WSN).

According to the press release, this issue includes a look at forward-thinking healthcare applications for WSN that could greatly improve electronic triage at large disasters by monitoring the injured as well as medical personnel; a conservation approach for utilizing sensor networks to conserve natural resources like electricity, gas and water, and the emerging trend of publishing real-time sensor data on the Web that opens up a wide variety of novel application scenarios. 

Neal Patwari, guest editor for the Sensor Networks and Applications edition explains that Sensor network research has grown dramatically in the seven years since Proceedings of the IEEE (News - Alert) first published a special research issue on ‘Sensor Networks and Applications’ in August, 2003, and the visions for sensor networks and their applications have changed as research perspectives have shifted, so as we move forward it is important to pause at this crossroad and ‘look both ways’ to better understand how these perspectives came to be and have evolved over time.

With various standards bodies, such as the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force), Z-Wave and ZigBee, adopting IP within low-power wireless networking standards, the stage has been set for the next tier of the Internet.

 Jonathan Hui of Cisco (News - Alert) Systems said that A decade ago, the sensor networking community eschewed the use of IP for low-power networking because of a perception that IP was too resource-intensive and ill-suited to the needs of sensor network applications and not being bound to particular network architecture allowed significant developments in low-power wireless networking, but it was difficult to incorporate such networks into an existing IP-based network infrastructure.

Medical care will be a major beneficiary of the research outlined in “Wireless Sensor Networks for Healthcare” by JeongGil Ko, Chenyang Lu, Mani B. Srivastava, John A. Stankovic, Andreas Terzis and Matt Welsh, when these applications come to fruition. With the aging of America, the use of wireless sensor technology to foster an economical and efficient way to monitor age-related illnesses could be big news now and in the future. The paper explains how wireless networked sensors could be carried on a person or embedded in people’s living spaces to collect data about personal, physical, physiological and behavioral states in real-time, everywhere.