Large area environmental monitoring can play a crucial role in dealing with crisis situations, such as forest fires or industrial gas and chemical leaks. Forest fires alone are responsible for thousands of fatalities worldwide every year and exposure to the unmonitored emission of toxic gases in industrialised and remote regions can also lead to fatalities and lifelong health issues.
Existing early warning environmental monitoring systems rely on satellite monitoring, watchtowers or expensive fixed sensors. Fixed network infrastructure can be implemented in specific areas, but installing such networks over large areas is not practical as the cost of installation becomes unreasonably high, especially in remote areas.
A group of researchers at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia are seeking to address these environmental and high-cost concerns through the development of an attractive solution in the form of a low-cost, 3D printed reliable node system. The system, developed by a research team led by Associate Professor of electrical engineering Atif Shamim, works by saturating high-risk areas with disposable sensor nodes that are linked wirelessly to a few fixed nodes that raise the alarm. The smart sensor system is capable of detecting noxious gases and changes in temperature and humidity that could revolutionise environmental monitoring.
“The main idea was to create inexpensive, disposable, wireless sensors, which can sense and send the data out. We wanted to prove that you don’t need traditional fixed expensive sensors for environmental monitoring. We want to make sensors, that are low cost, disposable, variable, and dispersible,” Shamim noted.
Creating low-cost real-time environmental monitoring
Designed by KAUST Ph.D. student Muhammad Farooqui, the node has been tested in both the laboratory and in the field. It survives being dropped from a height and subjected to temperatures up to 70°C, which, says Shamim, “is good enough to give an early warning in cases of wildfire.” He believes it is the first “low-cost, fully integrated, packaged, 3D-printed wireless sensor node for real-time environmental monitoring.”
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