Beasties in the creative workplace

The paper presents an evaluation of an installation of the Beastie wireless sensor network to monitor a creative workplace - the University of the Arts Innovation Centre in London. The sensor network was tasked with passively monitoring the environment and space usage taking into account environmental conditions and activity. The paper focuses on one of the many platforms used in the trial - the Beastie, using an architectural description language implementation called Tesserae - to measure meeting room and social space usage. These data were correlated using feature mapping at node level on tiny 8-bit devices, and state changes were propagated up the network to the database. Some monitoring results are provided and the performance of the algorithms on the small devices discussed. The lessons learnt are reviewed and observations are presented on the practicalities of installing and maintaining the sensor application in a commercial office environment.