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"Using Sensor-based Networks to Address Global Issues: Policy Opportunities and Challenges" was the title of an experts conference that the OECD organized on June 8-9, 2009, which was hosted by Portugal and took place in Lisbon.

The goal of the Conference was to help policy makers:

Understand Sensor-Based Networks and their potential contribution to economic and social welfare,
Identify how to further stimulate innovation in this area and foster the development of these technologies where they are needed the most and are the most promising.

Andreas Krisch, President of European Digital Rights (EDRI), member of CSISAC attended the meeting, and wrote the following report about the meeting.

"Using Sensor-based Networks to Address Global Issues: Policy Opportunities and Challenges"

Report

Following an Opening Session, the one and a half days event was organized in four sessions: Health and elderly care, protection of the environment, transportation and policy discussion.

Opening Session:
In the opening Session Florent Frederix (European Commission, DG INFSO) presented the past activities of the EC with regard to RFID and the Internet of Things and gave an outlook on the plans of the Commission for the years to come. After having adopted the recommendation on RFID in May (http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/policy/rfid/documents/recommendationonrfid2009.pdf) a Communication on the Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to be adopted in the near future. In the next years (2008 - 2011) a number of large scale RFID pilot projects will be funded via the ICT policy support program. Policy with regard to the Internet of Things will be integrated with the Future Internet Initiative. One of the issues the EC will deal with is to establish a workable framework for Privacy Impact Assessments for RFID and IoT.

The following speakers, Mr. Haugli (Telenor) and Prof. Kitsuregawa presented their pilot implementations of sensor networks and research projects respectively. Pilots carried out by Telenor range from salad logistics to waste management to the tracking of roaming sheep to decrease the number of lost animals. Prof. Kitsuregawa (University of Tokyo) is the principal investigator of the Information Grand Voyage Project (http://www.igvpj.jp/index_en/) and introduced applications like the Digital Helper and My Live Assist, which combine location and behavioral data to learn from this data its users preferences. Based on this behavioral analysis the systems then can give hints on how to increase ones health status by changing certain habits (e.g. use the stairs instead of the elevator) or to better target advertisements based on the collected information. The project also works on methods to anonymize the collected data before using it for data mining purposes.

Session 1:
The Session on Health and elderly care dealt with the use of sensor networks for use in home care and hospitals. While the health care expenses in the USA increased in 2007 by 6.7 % (similar figures apply for Canada) sensor networks and electronic medical networks are expected to not only decrease the costs for health care but also to improve quality of life for elderly people and to provide more accurate and timely information on the health status of a patient. While some panelists argued that people would most likely accept to trade better health supply and increased quality of life for weaker privacy protection, also projects were introduced in the session that utilized the W3C (http://www.w3.org/) Platform for Privacy Preferences (http://www.w3.org/P3P/) and insights from the PRIME project.

Technology-wise many of the introduced applications can already be built with existing technologies and architectures but the "last meter" between network and sensors attached to the human body is still challenging. For this, is still needed a simple easy to use technology that automatically establishes the connection, operates with low power consumption and which is unobtrusive, affordable and provides continuous connection to the network.

Session 2:
In the session on Protection of the environment research and pilot projects on sensing of environmental data were presented. In Australia, a number of sensor network pilots deal with diverse measurements of seawater and other conditions of the ocean. Other projects deal with agricultural sustainability. The German Fraunhofer Institute works on the miniaturization of sensors (size of a grain is almost achieved) and presented a project on precision farming, where large quantities (several thousands) of sensors are distributed across a field to determine the humidity of the various regions of the field to adjust the watering system accordingly and only provide precisely as much water as is needed in this part of the field. Aim of this project is to achieve a significant reduction of water usage. Further areas in which sensor networks are already used include industrial production processes, where Honeywell provides solutions that help reducing energy consumption and increasing the efficiency of machinery. For the systems with a large number of used sensors it is - with regard to scalability - expected that under certain circumstances the IT energy consumption might nullify the savings they provide. In manageable areas (like buildings) where only a relatively limited number of sensors is needed savings can be realized and under some circumstances also contracting solutions are already offered, where the system provider is paid over time out of the savings of the system.

Session 3:
In the session on Transportation several projects of the MIT SENSEable City Laboratory were presented, one of which is collecting environmental data (air quality...) via sensors mounted on bicycles and will in 2010 be deployed in Copenhagen. Two other projects that were presented by speakers in this session dealt with the monitoring of road traffic and vehicle ground activities on airports. Concept of the road traffic monitoring system (Coopers - http://www.coopers-ip.eu/) is to collect position and status (indicators for slippery roads or dangerous situations) information from vehicles on the road and feed orders (e.g. decrease speed, use right lane, ...) back to the vehicle. The information received from vehicles can then be used to warn other vehicles in time that dangerous situations might be ahead. The project on surveiling ground activities on airports (SafeGround ) is based on GPS / EGNOS data that is collected by sensor boxes on the vehicles and provide position information on every vehicle at an airport. The position of each vehicle can then be displayed on a map of the airport and be used to prevent accidents. The communication of the sensor boxes with the central system is being realised via WiFi or WiMax.

Session 4:
In the session on policy options on the second day of the conference, the Session chairs summarised the results of their sessions (see links to the summaries below). Following these presentations the panellists reflected on theses results and the presentations of the previous day. Gérard Santucci (EC, DG INFSO), Alessandra Pierruci (Italian DPA) and Andreas Krisch (EDRi) all stressed the huge importance of data protection in the field of sensor networks. Only with properly implemented measures for the protection of personal data it will be possible to create enough trust, that such systems will be accepted and can be successfully operated. Therefore an open dialogue with all stakeholders is essential to be able to properly address all concerns. Especially it has to be ensured that users have access to all information needed to exercise their data protection rights (access, correction, deletion), which is a difficult task with sensor networks. Solutions to the privacy problems of sensor networks might be found with Privacy Impact Assessments, which not only should be done before the deployment of sensor networks but already before beginning research. Addressing the privacy problems in this early stage will ensure that systems are designed in a way beneficiary to privacy protection. Criteria and Guidelines for such assessments were developed for security research and technology during the PRISE project (http://prise.oeaw.ac.at/) where also was demonstrated for the security sector, that such an early stage approach can lead to increased privacy (instead of a trade-off) by implementing security technology.

In the conclusions the chair summarized the key policy issues to be addressed in the future. These are given in the presentation at The Conclusions for key policy issues to be addressed in the future are at: http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/20/14/43018148.pdf

More information on the conference is available on the conference website (http://www.oecd.org/sti/ict/sensors), where also the presentations are available in PDF format.

The summaries of the sessions are at: