How Micro-Location, Geofencing and Indoor Location Are Driving The Retail Revolution
Indoor Location has become the holy grail of location based-marketing, bringing consumers from their home to the closest shopping mall or retailer, greeting them with a message as they enter the mall or the store, helping them navigate indoors, send product information and special promotions as they get closer, and finally allow them to pay for the items right from their mobile. With the hype surrounding the launch of iBeacon in the Apple retail stores, proximity sensors, also called proximit...
Sensor Sensibility: Project Planning and Deployment Considerations
The wireless sensor network is fundamentally a distributed network of constrained devices. There are a host of considerations that must be taken into account when planning and implementing a wireless sensor network – considerations that are often overlooked in the lavish space in which traditional IT operates with nearly extravagant disk space, CPU and working memory. In contrast, the wireless sensor is a targeted device with limited memory, limited power, and limited processing capabilities, wh...
Wearable Computing and the Internet of Things
It is hard to go anywhere now and not see individuals or whole crowds of people staring at their “device”. I was walking past an outdoor café the other day and noticed that every single person on the patio was engaged in texting, searching and scanning. No one was talking. It is pretty obvious that wearable devices will very soon replace our “phones” which will become at most a router or local http server. Longer term they will no longer exist. While the exact format (and number) of wearable dev...
Indoor Location: The Mobile Revolution Starts Now
The future of mobile location-based services lies in its rapid adoption of indoor technologies. For more than 20 years, the use of global positioning system, or GPS, has been the gold standard for outdoor navigation. The satellite-based navigation system has become the indispensable tool for anyone to determine their location outside of a building, in a car, on motorways, in the street… More recently, cell-phone manufacturers have added GPS capabilities to mobile devices which in turn, create...
Sensor Sensibility: Communications Design Considerations for Energy Efficiency
One of the key design constraints in the deployment of a sensor network is the optimization of power consumption and energy efficiency. A problem familiar to those working with embedded devices is the need to eke out every possible capability while working within a set of hard and fast constraints. To a generation who has grown up in the era of Moore’s Law, the availability of GB of memory and TB of data storage is taken for granted. Even a bottom-end cellphone may come with as much as 16 GB...
OGC Sensor Web Standards and the “Smart City”
Sensors are everywhere. There are now thousands of sensors for every human on Earth. And there will be even more thousands in the future. At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, applications that use sensors to monitor your home environment, track your luggage, the location of your pets, your weight and, in the case of a new "smart fork," even how fast you eat are being demonstrated. Notice that the majority of these sensor based applications have a location element. The concept of the smar...
Sensor Sensibility: Applications to Analytics, Modeling and Simulation
Deploying sensors in the environment provides opportunities that previously were impossible, or at least cost prohibitive. Twenty years ago, monitoring a wide field meant a deployed field crew visiting areas of interest frequently, or perhaps aerial surveys building an image product on a regular basis. Yet neither of these resource and cost intensive activities could provide the kind of granular insight that is becoming available today. At best, these were coarse approximations. While they allow...
Achieving Model-Based Design for the Smart Grid
Smart Meters and SCADA Contribute a Big Data Perspective Smart meters and intelligent electronic devices provide granular data about the state of the utility network in near real-time. The availability of such data is in no small part what is making the smart grid, well, smart. Now, this data is being harnessed by utilities for greater customer insight and designs that are informed by performance. In one sense, the smart-grid is a dynamic real-time system that adapts and heals as condition...
Sensor Data Helps Calibrate Water Models
Thomas M. Walski, Ph.D., P.E., D.WRE, F. ASCE, is Bentley Systems senior product manager for Water and Sewer Products. Walski has been intimately involved with the modeling of water networks for decades, and has worked with Bentley Systems to introduce seminal hydraulic modeling tools such as WaterGEMS and WaterCAD. He recently discussed the impact of modeling and sensing on modern water systems with Informed Infrastructure. Informed Infrastructure: Tom, what’s your role at Bentley Systems, a...
Sensor Sensibility: Sensors Transform the Information Ecosystem
Welcome to the inaugural issue of Sensor Sensibility. This column will focus on a number of topics related to sensors ranging from sensor platforms to sensor data, standards to architectures. Sensors are transforming the information ecosystem, providing an opportunity for real-time data acquisition of ambient conditions. Historically, geographic information systems have provided the view into the “real world” – from land base data like roads and rivers, to aerial photography or remotely sense...
Stormwater Interview with Robert Page, P.E., Vice President, HNTB
Santa Barbara County North Branch Jail Expansion
February Issue 2026
