SBIR Phase I: Low-cost, wireless, energy harvesting environmental sensors

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The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project would be commercial availability of a low-cost, wireless, energy-harvesting environmental sensor for high-granularity sensing, feedback, and control to a number of markets including buildings, industrial, agricultural, and any other application that would benefit from monitoring where power or access is in short supply. The primary target market for this technology is the buildings sector, where the proposed wireless sensor network will be transformational for building monitoring and control. The high temporal and spatial resolution of the data delivered by this system additionally contains, given the proper analysis, actionable information with impacts on system operation, efficiency, and safety. The data analysis development proposed will take a first important step towards the automatic identification and extraction of this high value actionable information. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project focuses on the development of a low-cost, wireless, and energy harvesting environmental sensor, and a data aggregation / visualization platform to enable effective communication of data to users and control systems. This project addresses major barriers in the main market, the application of Internet of Things to the buildings sector, where complexity is encountered in the placement and powering of sensors in monitoring locations where access is limited. By reducing the upfront and maintenance costs of wireless sensor networks, the project allows cost-effective building sensor data collection of unprecedented longevity and density. These rich data sets in turn enable myriad benefits, including more effective building management controls and in-depth automated energy evaluations.