The global aim of MIMOSA is to make Ambient Intelligence a reality by developing a mobile-phone centric open technology platform. In order to technically achieve it, MIMOSA's concentrates on the following technical objectives:

 

Enabling platform for Ambient Intelligence

In the MIMOSA vision, the personal mobile phone is chosen as the trusted intelligent user interface to Ambient Intelligence and a gateway between the sensors, the network of sensors, the public network and the Internet. MIMOSA develops an open technology platform for implementing ambient intelligence in different application areas. The well-defined platform allows a fast and focused development of both basic technology solutions as well as system-level applications and services. MIMOSA focuses to develop micro- and nanosystems in several areas of the MIMOSA open platform (indicated using framed boxes in the figure below). Examples of micro and nanosystems developments by MIMOSA are (Environment domain) wireless remote-powered and autonomous sensors exploiting RFID, low-power radios exploiting RFMEMS, (User domain) microsystem-based intuitive user interfaces, MEMS based user-activity and physiological sensors, (Phone domain) MEMS-based inertial, magnetic and audio sensors.

 

 

 

Enabling context awareness

MIMOSA enables context awareness by developing microsensors and short-range communication exploiting, e.g., RFID tags. As a generic physical sensor, MIMOSA will develop a single-chip 3-D gyroscope and a single-chip 3-D magnetometer, neither of which is available today. A 3-D magnetometer enables direction measurement. 3-D inertial sensors enable inertial navigation as well as measurements of user activity and gestures. Phased arrays of MEMS microphones are developed for acoustical context sensing as well as user interface. MIMOSA will also generate a technology platform for novel low-cost non-invasive physiological sensors. This technology is based on an array of microneedles and is applied especially for the lactate monitoring for which the state-of-the-art still uses an invasive method using a drop of blood.

Developing new intuitive user interface

The lack of intuitive and efficient user interfaces is today one of the major obstacles to exploiting information and using services. Improved anthropocentric interfaces will have a large influence on the acceptability of devices for ambient intelligence and help especially people who cannot or do not want to use corresponding services today.
MIMOSA develops novel, user-friendly interfaces that enables intuitive physical browsing of the environment. Examples of such solutions are the PointMe and TouchMe concepts, to be demonstrated for the first time by MIMOSA, which enable intuitive selections of nearby objects with wireless, short-range connectivity.

Investigating energy scavenging

There are mainly three forms of energy that can be harvested for remote powering a sensor node: radiations (solar, electromagnetic), thermal (temperature difference) and mechanical (vibrations and motion). Mechanical vibrations are usually well suited for use on the human body (automatic watch powering) and for high frequency vibrating environments (transportation, machines). In the case of MIMOSA the scenarios will be more oriented on the home environment and as a result thermoelectric devices and EM direct conversion (taking advantage of the RF front-end architecture of the RFID functions proposed on each sensor nodes) will be addressed.

Developing advanced integrated microsystems technologies

The technology platform to be developed within MIMOSA is based on a thin SOI MEMS process resulting in a MEMSIC concept. Horizontal and vertical integration schemes of MEMS devices with ICs and advanced packaging techniques for MEMSIC will be addressed.