Web of Things as a Product Improvement tool: Furniture as Case Study

Sensors integrated within a product can provide lots of information about how the product is used and its status. Easy to extract information, such as hours used per day, temperature or humidity could be very valuable to the manufacturer in order to improve its product for real use. The manufacturer may realize that his/her initial estimations do not match reality and may decide to select different materials or design based on real data. For non-technological products the integration of sensors is not trivial and has not been analyzed prior to this work. The selection of suitable sensors is critical in order to achieve an accurate description about product use. This paper analyzes this problem focusing on a furniture product, more specifically a sofa, as a case study of a non-technological product. First, we compare different kinds of suitable sensors in relation to furniture integration, how good they describe the product usage and other important variables such as material degradation. We later describe the experiments that have been used to validate the previous assumptions. The experimental results summarize the usefulness and accuracy of each sensor data for describing the product use and/or degradation. Finally, the paper proposes an architecture for a complete "web of things" system capable of gathering the information from the WSN and sending it to a remote server. This architecture has been implemented with a ZigBee WSN and a coordinator node with Ethernet connectivity.