Health-Enabled Smart Sensor Fusion Technology

It has been proven that the combination of smart sensors with embedded metadata and wireless technologies present real opportunities for significant improvements in reliability, cost-benefits, and safety for remote testing and measurement. Adding robust and self-construct network protocol for routing will further simplify testing installation process and increase test network reliability. While the idea of largely autonomous sensors is desirable, there are many issues of cooperation and control that need to be addressed. Specifically, the sensor fusion and the schema of smart sensor attributes: prediction, planning, updating, communication, and assimilation. The IEEE 1451 standard provides a basic communications link for sensors, but provides no methods specific to programming a sensor's data processing resources for data fusion. Combining IEEE 1451 and networked database, as well as health-enabled smart sensor fusion technology enables user to interface to sensor network to provide dynamic programming and access/monitor the health of sensor nodes. The sensor fusion technology is built upon an open-system architecture with standardized protocol modules/stacks such as SQL, HTML, XML, MATLAB, and LabVIEW.