Sensor Networks and the Smart Campus

 

       

Course 1.S992/1.013 – Professors Colette Heald and Jesse Kroll
Develop a sensor network to monitor the health of MIT’s environment and infrastructure.  The fall semester’s activities focus on architecture and concept design.  Spring semester will translate these concepts into prototypes for data collection and analysis.

This is a planned series of Civil and Environmental Engineering senior capstone courses focused on pervasive sensing.  Each year the class will address a new theme in CEE – air quality, hydrology, microbiology, transportation, buildings, etc. – by designing and deploying a state-of-the-art sensor network for MIT’s campus. Data from this network will be accessible online, in real-time, for both researchers and the wider public.
The 2013/2014 theme is air quality, led by Profs. Colette L.  Heald and Jesse H. Kroll.  About 20 sensor nodes were built and deployed around campus in indoor and outdoor locations plus some MIT shuttle vehicles.  The sensors make calibrated measurements of temperature, humidity, NOx, CO2, and Particulate Matter. The measurements are transmitted to a central processing facility in real-time by WiFi, and posted on a web page for the MIT community.