EnHANTs Demo Receives Best Student Demo Award in ACM SenSys 2011

November 19, 2011

A demo presented by members of the Energy Harvesting Active Networked Tags (EnHANTs) Project received the Best Student Demo Award in the ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (ACM SenSys 2011) which is the premier conference of the sensor networking community.

The demo titled "Organic Solar Cell-equipped Energy Harvesting Active Networked Tag (EnHANT) Prototypes" was developed by 10 students (Gerald Stanje, Paul Miller, Jianxun Zhu, Alexander Smith, Olivia Winn, Robert Margolies, Maria Gorlatova, John Sarik, Marcin Szczodrak, and Baradwaj Vigraham) from the groups of Professors Carloni (CS), Kinget, Kymissis, and Zussman.

The EnHANTs Project is an interdisciplinary project that focuses on developing small, flexible, and energetically self-reliant devices. These devices can be attached to objects that are traditionally not networked (e.g., books, furniture, walls, doors, toys, keys, clothing, and produce), thereby providing the infrastructure for various novel tracking applications. Examples of these applications include locating misplaced items, continuous monitoring of objects (e.g., items in a store and boxes in transit), and determining locations of disaster survivors.

The SenSys demo showcased EnHANT prototypes that are integrated with novel custom-developed organic solar cells and with novel custom Ultra-Wideband (UWB) transceivers, and demonstrated various network adaptations to environmental energy conditions. A video of the demo will soon be available on the EnHANTs website.

In 2009, the project won first place in the Vodafone Americas Foundation Wireless Innovation Competition; in 2011, it received the IEEE Communications Society Award for Outstanding Paper on New Communication Topics. The project has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, the Department of Homeland Security, Google, and Vodafone.