Automatic monitoring and control of museums’ environment based on Wireless Sensor Networks

In museums, it is critical to properly conserve the existing artwork. For this purpose, it is fundamental to continuously monitor its environment, either in storage or exhibition rooms. Contrarily to traditional measuring equipments and procedures used in museums, the deployment of a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) can help to implement these measurements continuously, in a real-time basis, and in a much easier and cheaper way. This is the main objective of the WISE-MUSE project, which proposes the use of WSNs for museums’ environmental and structural monitoring, and automatic environmental control. In this paper, the implementation and the main results of the WISE-MUSE project, which was carried out in a contemporary art museum, are described. Among other important contributions that will also be described in this paper, the development of a new wireless sensor node and a Web-based visualization tool, which bring some considerable advantages when compared with other commercially available solutions, are emphasized.