Validation of a low-cost wireless sensors node for museum environmental monitoring

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) has been adopted in many contexts, such as healthcare or industry. In museum scenarios, WSN has been introduced for environmental monitoring, to control temperature and relative humidity. Nowadays, the development of low-cost micro-scale sensing units, opened to new possibilities for WSN development, enlarging the set of feasible measurements to gaseous pollutant concentration, relative humidity, temperature, light intensity, air flow, or vibration. This work is part of the overarching goal of developing a low-cost and minimally invasive WSN designed for a museum scenario. The proposed WSN node, based on a ZigBee standard, gathers signals provided by: A 9-Axis MIMU, a sensor for temperature and relative humidity, and three gas detection boards. In this paper, specifically, we present performances of the WSN node in detecting: structure tilt, vibrations, and daily cycle of humidity, temperature, and gas deposition.