A proposal of a new standard for sensor signal analysis

This paper presents a proposal outline of a new standard with focus in the sensor signal itself rather than on the transducer as a smart system. Since that the “intelligence” has emigrated to the point of measurement, a lot of efforts have been carried out to standardize the sensor connection. As an important result, the IEEE 1451 standards were developed. They allow automating this process by incorporating the necessary data as part of the transducer itself. One major benefit provided by the standardization process was the creation of a standard Transducer Electronic Data Sheet (TEDS) in IEEE 1451.2 This standard simplified the use of smart sensors by normalizing the way transducers can describe themselves to measurement and control systems. In the same way that the IEEE 1451 standard was created, signal parameters themselves should be standardized. An equivalent to the TEDS should be defined for the sensor signal feature extraction. A time domain algorithm is proposed as a building block for signal analysis. It is based on signal segmentation following of a labeling process. As a result, the smart sensor realizes what kind of signal it is sensoring. The computational cost of the proposed algorithms is extremely low so they can be built in into smart sensors and executed in real time to provide a normalized platform for sensory data cooperation.