The Ni3 is a wearable device that exchanges data by wireless with micro sensors located in its vicinity.

The watch is intended to form part of a ubiquitous sensor network. The network consists of modules that detect various events such as environmental or health conditions, and then communicate with other network modules for resolution or response.

A new version of a wearable sensor module named Ni3 is presented which consists of a sensor, analog/digital signal processing circuits, and an RF transceiver. Ni3 communicates with a network module which has an RF transceiver, digital signal processing circuits and an interface with a computer which is linked to the Internet through public wireless communication infrastructure. An MPU with nonvolatile programmability is used in both types of modules. Only a minimal set of instruction in the MPU is used in the digital signal processing without using any operation system. This allows flexible configuration of communication protocol. Ni3 enables digital signal processing and wireless communication protocols which are flexibly configured for numerous different applications.

The Ni3 conforms to IEEE 802.15.4 standards for wireless personal area networks and works with ZigBee compliant products that are just now becoming available.

So if you come within range of a temperature (or light, door status, vibration, radiation or badge recognition) sensor, you could for example, program your watch to respond with a request to lower the temperature to more comfortable setting.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 25th, 2004 at 7:11 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.