Sensor Networks for Public Safety (SenSafety)

Modern societies are becoming more and more vulnerable to disruptions of safety in public places. Technical failures or the behavior of malicious people may cause disruption of the regular operation of parts of our critical infrastructure. These disruptions pose a threat to operation of for example power plants, public transportation systems, and harbors. Disruptions in the normal operation of this infrastructure may have a large impact on our economy and way of living. The threat to this infrastructure is still increasing. The Sensor Networks for Public Safety (SenSafety) project aims to offer real-time automatic analysis of potential hazardous situations and detection of important events and provide support in these situations to first responders to guarantee the safety of the general public as well as of the responding authorities.

The research in the SenSafety project focuses on heterogeneous hierarchical sensor networks for safety and security in public places. The project will have contributions in four areas: system architecture, intelligent streaming data sensors, networking protocols and distributed signal processing. Within the system architecture area, research focuses on combining the processing of streaming data (e.g., audio and video) and events (e.g., detection of movement) in one system. The research on intelligent streaming data sensors focuses on the energy efficient processing of sensed data as well as the reconfiguration of already deployed sensors. Methods, protocols, and techniques to deploy wireless networks and to reliably send the sensed and processed data through these networks are investigated within the networking area. Data gathered from many sensors must be combined in order to draw meaningful conclusions. Techniques to perform so called sensor fusion are researched within the distributed signal processing area.

More information?

You can find more information on this project at http://www.sensafety.nl.