MATEMA6: Machine Tele-Monitoring Assistance with 6LoWPAN

Manually detection of machine failures in a factory is a time-consuming and costly task. Tele-monitoring is critical to alleviate this problem and recover from failures quickly. Energy conservation of such a tele-monitoring system is an important consideration. MATEMA6 enables us to monitor and notify the machine status with rapidly and low energy consumption. It is built on top of commodity technologies: a small board computer like Raspberry Pi, a low-power wireless protocol, and mobile phones. Raspberry Pi periodically gathers data from the machines through 6LoWPAN over Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). The machine errors are notified immediately to the Android application on mobile phones. In addition, the employee can monitor their assigned machines; and the manager can see the overall performance of the factory via the Web browser either on the PC or the mobile phones. We also measure the energy consumption and show that the 6LoWPAN over BLE consumes only 45% and 76% of Wi-Fi and wired Ethernet, respectively.