Wireless Sensor Networks in Life Science applications

Over the last years Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) have been becoming increasingly applicable for real world scenarios and now production ready solutions are available. In the same period the upcoming combination of Service-oriented Architectures and Web Service technology demonstrated a way to realize open standardized, flexible, service component based, loosely coupled and interoperable cross domain Enterprise Software solutions. But those solutions have been too resource-intensive and complex to be applicable for limited devices like wireless sensor nodes or small-sized embedded systems. Thus, more and more research investigations have been launched to bring the aspect of cross domain interoperability to the field of embedded battery powered devices. Now it is time to show the potential of integrating Web Services enabled WSN solutions in Enterprise systems. The proposed laboratory assistance solution in this paper demonstrates the benefits of Web Service enabled WSNs for process monitoring and disaster management by extending an existing system in the Life Science Automation domain.