Enabling museum's environmental monitorization based on low-cost WSNs

A major concern to all museums' managers is to properly conserve the available artwork and, in order to achieve that, it is fundamental to monitor the museum's environment. Therefore, it is critical to continuously measure some environmental parameters, such as temperature, relative humidity, light and, also, pollutants, either in storage or exhibition rooms. The deployment of a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) in a museum can help implementing these measurements continuously, in a real-time basis, and in a much easier and cheaper way than traditional procedures. This is the main objective of the WISE-MUSE project, which proposes a museum environmental and structural monitoring and automatic control using WSNs. Thus, in this paper, we describe the implementation and the main results of the WISE-MUSE platform validation in a contemporary art museum which is located in Madeira Island, Portugal. For this purpose, we have developed a new wireless sensor node and a Web-based visualisation tool which bring some considerable advantages when compared with other commercially available solutions.