IoT with a Soft Touch: A Modular Remote Sensing Platform for STE(A)M Applications

Besides wide attraction in industry, Internet of Things (IoT) is being used to advance Science, Technology, Engineering, (Arts) and Mathematics (STE(A)M) education across a range of education levels. This work presents a remote sensing platform, named IoT with a Soft Touch, developed to achieve two goals. First, it aims to lower the technicality, stimulating the students to do STE(A)M. Second, the technology is to be used in "softer" applications (e.g., environmental and health care), thereby aiming to attract a more diverse set of student profiles. Students can easily build a wireless sensing device, minding a specific application. The modular design of the platform and an intuitive graphical configurator tool allows them to tailor the device’s functionality to their needs. Unlike existing solutions, where integration is hard to achieve due to the combination of pre-made sensor nodes, our solution features full hardware and software integration. The sensor’s data, transmitted wirelessly through a long-range wide-area network (LoRaWAN), can be viewed and analyzed on a dashboard, or the raw data can be extracted for further processing, e.g., as part of the school’s STE(A)M curriculum. This work elaborates on the low-power and modular design challenges, and how the platform is used in education.