How to establishing a remote monitoring network
From Shareideas
Contents |
Sample uses
- Measuring water or energy consumption
- Running a small retail operation
- Monitoring non-attendance at school
What are remote monitoring sensors (telemetry)?
Telemetry is a technology that allows the remote measurement and reporting of information of interest to the system designer or central operator. Telemetry is closely linked with telematic - the process of long-distance transmission of computer-based information. Telematic results from joining the terms “Telecommunications” and “Informatic.”
How and where to use telemetry
Possible uses include anything that can be remotely monitored, translated into digital format, and sent as data over GPRS/UMTS networks. Practical examples include:
Agriculture - Wireless weather stations play a major role in disease prevention and precision irrigation. These stations transmit back to a base station the major parameters needed for good decisions: air temperature and relative humidity, precipitation and leaf wetness data (needed for disease prediction models), solar radiation and wind speed (needed to calculate evaporation levels), and sometimes also soil moisture, crucial for proper irrigation decisions in order to understand the absorption of water into the soil and towards the roots. Such data needs to come from right within the crop, since local micro-climates can vary significantly. Weather data from the next airport doesn't do much good, so farmers need to put weather stations right into their own crops. These stations usually transmit data by GSM/GPRS or sometimes satellite. Solar power makes the station independent from local infrastructure.
Water management - Telemetry has become indispensable for proper water management. Major applications include AMR (Automatic Meter Reading), ground water monitoring, leak detection in distribution pipelines, and equipment surveillance. Having data available in almost real time allows quick reactions to occurrences in the field.
Resource distribution - Many resources need to be distributed over wide areas. Telemetry is essential in these cases, since it allows the system to channel resources to where they are needed.
Medicine - Telemetry is also used for patients (biotelemetry) who are at risk of abnormal heart activity, generally in a coronary care unit. Such patients are outfitted with measuring, recording, and transmitting devices. A data log can be useful in diagnosis of the patient's condition by doctors. An alerting function can summon nurses if the patient is suffering from an acute or dangerous condition.
Wildlife study and management - Telemetry is now being used to study wildlife, and has been particularly useful for monitoring threatened species at the individual level. Animals under study may be fitted with simple tags, cameras, GPS packages, or transceivers to provide position and other basic information to scientists and stewards.
Vehicle tracking - Vehicle tracking is a way of monitoring the location, movements, status, and behaviour of a vehicle or fleet of vehicles. This is achieved through a combination of a GPS receiver and an electronic device (usually comprising a GSM GPRS modem or SMS sender) installed in each vehicle, communicating with the user (dispatching, emergency, or co-coordinating unit) and PC- or web-based software. The data is turned into information by management reporting tools, in conjunction with a visual display on computerised mapping software. An advanced vehicle localization system for public transport may employ odometry instead of GPS/GNSS.
Wireless vehicle safety communications - Wireless vehicle safety communications aid in car safety and road safety. It is an electronic sub-system in a car or other vehicle for the purpose of exchanging safety information, about such things as road hazards and the location and speed of vehicles, over short range radio links. This may involve temporary ad hoc wireless local area networks. Wireless units will be installed in vehicles and probably also in fixed locations such as near traffic signals and emergency call boxes along the road. Sensors in cars and at the fixed locations, as well as possible connections to wider networks, will provide the information, which will be displayed to the drivers in some way. The range of the radio links can be extended by forwarding messages along multi-hop paths. Even without fixed units, information about fixed hazards can be maintained by moving vehicles by passing it backwards. It also seems possible for traffic lights, which one can expect to become smarter, to use this information to reduce the chance of collisions.
How to set up telemetry
The telecommunications solution is straightforward. A communications transmitter has to be attached with the sensor in use for the specific use. This transmitter sends data to a central location via the network. A central software application processes data received and displays it in accordance with the user’s needs. These software applications are often linked with databases that record all information received. The complexity and cost of the solutions adopted are proportional to the quality and reliability of sensors used to remotely monitor certain parameters.
There are numerous commercial applications but the concept is always the same and often a standard application can be used for very different aims.
