The Smart Kindergarten system that we are designing will consist
of a large number of sensors wirelessly connected to a background
infrastructure that provides storage and computing services. While
some of the sensors might be dumb, in general the sensors would
also have associated processing capability to allow functions such
as signal processing for feature extraction to be performed locally,
which might be preferred to sending raw data over the wireless
network. The infrastructure is “in the walls” and virtually
unrestricted in its capability; the bottlenecks are in the power,
computation, storage, and communication capabilities of the
embedded devices. For hardware we are implementing a miniature
“sensing + wireless communication + embedded processing”
module that will be embedded in the objects in the real-life
Kindergarten that we will soon instrument. The module is based
around Ericsson’s Bluetooth module mated to a custom board that
we are designing with sensor I/O.