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.