Significant advances in microelectromechanical micro-sensor systems (MEMS) and wireless communication technologies have promoted the development of wireless sensor networks. A WSN consists of many sensor nodes densely deployed in a field, each capable of collecting environmental information and together capable of supporting multihop ad hoc routing.
WSNs provide an economical and convenient way to monitor physical environments.
With its ability to detect the environment, WSN can enrich human life in applications such as health care, building monitoring and home safety. A wireless sensor network (WSN) is a wireless network consisting of autonomously spatially distributed devices that use sensors to cooperatively monitor physical or environmental conditions such as temperature, sound, vibration, pressure, movement, or contaminants in different places.
The development of wireless sensor networks was originally motivated by military applications such as battlefield surveillance. However, wireless sensor networks are now being used in many areas of civilian application, including environment and habitat surveillance, sanitary applications, home automation and traffic control. Applications for WSN are many and varied. They are used in commercial and industrial applications to monitor data that would be difficult or costly to monitor using wired sensors. They could be deployed in wild areas, where they would remain for many years (control of some environmental variables) without the need to recharge / replace their power supplies. They could form a perimeter over a property and monitor the progression of intruders (passing information from one node to another).

Future scope

The proposed iMouse integrates WSN technologies into surveillance technologies to support intelligent mobile surveillance services. On the one hand, these mobile sensors can help improve the weakness of traditional WSNs that only provide approximate environmental information from the detection field. By including mobile cameras, we can get much richer context information for deeper analysis.

On the other hand, surveillance can be done in an event-driven manner. Therefore, the weakness of traditional surveillance systems can be greatly improved because only critical information is retrieved from the context and sent proactively to users. The iMouse system prototype can be improved / extended in several ways. First, how to navigate mobile sensors can be further improved. For example, localization schemes can be integrated to guide mobile sensors instead of using color ribbons. Second, the coordination between mobile sensors, especially when they are on the road, can be exploited. Third, how to use mobile sensors to improve the network topology deserves more research.