Abstract— Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are spreading around in multiple fields of applications because they perform measuring tasks in a flexible way. This paper presents a survey on nowadays research efforts on the application of these WSNs to the automobile industry, to agriculture, and to wearable technologies (healthcare and athletes monitoring). From our practical deployments, it is important to highlight the functionalities for the automotive industry, and the results extracted from our application to a vineyard. Research on wearable technologies constitutes a challenge, and wireless healthcare solutions in the context of fabrics are being addressed. Index Terms — Agriculture applications, automotive applications, wearable technology, wireless sensor networks. I. INTRODUCTION WSN is a term used to describe an emerging class of embedded communication products that provide redundant, fault-tolerant wireless connections between sensors, actuators, and controllers. The large amount of research projects in this area allows for the existence of better tiny hardware devices with reduced cost/size, and improvements in software performance. WSNs are typically formed by groups of several sensor nodes, the so-called motes, whose individual constitution is based on actually combining sensor radios and CPUs into an effective robust secure and flexible network, with low power consumption, and advanced communication and computation capabilities, one or more sensors, a communication device (typically a radio), a microcontroller (with memory), and a power supply (battery), Fig. 1. These motes exchange messages among each other in order to efficiently monitor an environment/process. The power of wireless sensor networks lies in the ability to deploy large numbers of tiny wireless nodes that assemble and configure themselves. Manuscript received March 22, 2007, reveised April 16, 2007. J. M. Ferro, L. M. Borges, and F. J. Velez are with the Instituto de Telecomunicações, University of Beira Interior, Covilhã, Portugal (corresponding author to provide phone: +351 275329953; fax: +351 275329972; e-mail: joaomferro@ gmail.com, luismiguelborges@ gmail.com, fjv@ubi.pt ). A. S. Lebres is with the Department of Physics (UDR), University of Beira Interior, Covilhã, Portugal (phone: +351 275319840; fax: +351 275319719; e-mail: lebres@ ubi.pt). Figure 1 - Main sensor node hardware components WSNs started to be developed for military use, aiming to have real-time information about the condition and distribution of the troops as well as the location of the enemies. However, in recent years their field of application has been well expanded, and WSNs are being used for real-time tracking, in industry to monitor processes (e.g., temperature and pressure inside ovens), in habitats [1] (where the species, animals or plants, can be observed without being disturbed by human presence), within environments (detection of fires [2], measurement of temperature, pressure and wind speed, etc.), to in situ monitoring of the condition of structures and equipment, in smart spaces (such as cars), and in medicine to monitor patients [3], [4], among others. WSNs have specific characteristics different from common networks. One of the characteristics is the typical centralization of data, i.e., in the WSN the sensor nodes must take care of the specific requirements of the application. The nodes are focused in only one measure/attribute or in a small set of measures/attributes that need to be processed inside the network. The tolerance to the appearance of failures (very likely due to the fact that the sensors nodes are low cost) is another one of the characteristics of the WSN. The errors can occur, for example, due the energy failure, lack of communication, or lack of stability in software. Another important characteristic of WSNs is the scalability. As the sensor nodes are low cost and reduced size, it is possible to build up dense networks with a high number of nodes. The low consumption of energy is another basic characteristic of the system; hence, there are limitations to power supply in sensor nodes. Furthermore, motes must cooperate among them in order to efficiently exchange data, i.e., by using multi-hop to save energy. Besides, at the level of each individual sensor node, an efficient management of transmission, reception, and sleep modes of operation that should be implemented. Sensor nodes must remain in the sleep-mode whenever they do not have to receive/process/transmit data packets. Applications of Wireless Sensor Networks João M. Ferro, Luís M. Borges, Fernando J Velez, Member, IAENG, and António S. Lebres Proceedings of the World Congress on Engineering 2007 Vol II WCE 2007, July 2 - 4, 2007, London, U.K. ISBN:978-988-98671-2-6 WCE 2007