Presenter: Dr.Nick Safai
Authors: Emma Dingman, Isabella Gilman, Richard Baird, Erin Enders, Ethan Melvick, Jacob Atkinson, Abbas Rashidi, Armin Tajalli, Nick Safai
Faculty Advisor: Abbas Rashidi
Institution: University of Utah
The use of remote sensing technology is rapidly expanding across both commercial and private sectors. There are a wide variety of applications for this technology used to optimize productivity, including light sensors in homes, heart monitors in hospitals, and more. This article focuses on a technology that enables a remote sensing network to monitor industrial job sites. The proposed system Is a network of sound and position sensors communicating over wide band wireless frequencies. A microcontroller collects information and transmits the data to a passive monitoring system capable of determining what activity the machine is performing, and report this progress to a central computer. The system comprises a microphone, accelerometer, transceiver, real-time clock, and a microcontroller. Each component in the monitoring device exists as an integrated circuit interfacing with the microcontroller running the Arduino hardware abstraction layer (HAL). Bringing them together poses unique challenges. This paper details these challenges and their solutions. The benefits of this system, the gains it provides, and the challenges it poses, as well as additional details regarding the monitoring devices, sensors, and central computer, are discussed.