Wearable Sensor Ecologies and Geolocation Infrastructures

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With the development of the Internet of Things (IoT), itself an extension of efforts to develop smart environments, spatial information services are on the threshold of becoming ubiquitous. Today, with the widespread use of smart phones, geolocation tags have become the sine qua non of the modern internet. Big data is, to a large extent, geospatial in nature. Digital geospatial information, however, is becoming omnipresent not just at the scale of the landscape, but, increasingly, at the scale of the human body. Hence new technologies are under development that monitor what has been called proximal body space. Tying these two scales together, however, is a non trivial task. Furthermore, base mapping is still carried out using traditional surveying tools, and base mapping with centimetric accuracy is increasingly needed to support IoT developments, among others. The IoT, however, offers a more robust way of carrying out such high accuracy base mapping, essentially, by keeping track of geospatial data acquired by proactive smart chips embedded throughout the environment. In addition, smart garments and wearables as well as smart phones, will interact with fixed units to provide information at the scale of the human body in ways that can be related to geolocation infrastructures. Furthermore, body space will be equipped with, eventually, dozens (even hundreds) of sensors providing diverse functionalities, each of which will have a location and a role within the proximal body space. In this project, we propose to explore the linkages between proximal body spaces and the fixed environment in its geospatial capacities. This extends current work undertaken in the development of smart garments and wearables that interact with environments equipped with intelligence. Four different areas will be addressed. First, we will consolidate a framing theory under development we draw on ecosystem science and embodied philosophy for this. Second, we will develop a suite of design tools that incorporates the underlying theory to facilitate IoT design. Third, we will construct a small IoT that straddles the separation between indoor and outdoor environments. Finally, we will validate the functionality of both the fixed IoT and its interaction with mobile sensing units that pass through the fixed IoT environment. In addition to interactions between the mobile units and fixed sensors, we shall also explore mobile-to-mobile interactions - smart garments and wearables that interact with each other, supported by the IoT. The application of ecosystem approaches ensures that the deployed networks will not only contain robust procedures for updating and communication, but also enhances their ability to support human resiliency. Targeted applications include base mapping and its update, navigational and orientation assistance, collision avoidance, and monitoring functions in support of several application domains.