Abstract

Industries such as construction and road maintenance are characterised by environments where manual labor is performed in harsh conditions with minimal or no IT support. The aim of the NEMO project in Lancaster University is to explore the potential to improve the work practices, management and coordination of activities performed in such industries, by employing embedded wireless technologies. The objective is to build an environment where physical work artefacts such as tools, vehicles and workers are augmented with embedded cooperating mobile nodes featuring both sensors and actuators. These nodes can form ad-hoc networks, utilise their sensing capabilities in order to observe the activities performed, and collaboratively offer assistance to the worker crew, when necessary. One of the primary areas of interest is the development of such systems to support health and safety in construction and road maintenance sites. This talk describes the experiences of designing and deploying intelligent sensor nodes in road maintenance sites, with particular emphasis on the deployment of a system for monitoring workers’ exposure to Hand-Arm Vibrations.

Bio: Christos Efstratiou is a Research Associate in the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge. He received his Ph.D. from Lancaster University, UK. He has been a Research Associate in Lancaster University and a visiting researcher in Sony Electronics Distributed Systems Lab in San Jose. His early work focused on the support for adaptive and context-aware applications in mobile environments. More recently, he has been actively involved in research projects in the areas of wireless sensor networks, and pervasive computing. He is currently working in the area of system support for federated sensor networks.