The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met), in New York City, is employing battery-powered RFID sensor tags to gather and analyze data regarding the physical environment in which its artwork is displayed. Its goal is to eventually use that information to monitor changing conditions, and to subsequently adjust climate controls within its facility. Initially, the system is only collecting data about conditions around the art.
IBM Research‘s wireless sensor platform was installed at The Cloisters—a branch of the Met that displays medieval European art and architecture—under the leadership of Paolo Dionisi Vici, an associate research scientist in the museum’s department of scientific research.
The Cloisters is providing a good test site for the system prior to a museum-wide installation, since its many rooms pose a variety of climate-control challenges. The site includes approximately 3,000 works of art dating from the 12th to the 15th centuries, including paintings, polychrome wood sculptures and tapestries, such as a famed 15th-century unicorn hunt tapestry. The Cloisters also has high ceilings, as well as an outdoor settings and gardens, with doors that frequently open and close.
The artworks are extremely sensitive to environmental changes, the museum explains, and the variety of materials means that the Met must diligently manage the environment for the most sensitive art pieces—in some cases erring on the side of caution, by keeping temperatures and humidity controlled, thereby requiring a greater degree of heating or air conditioning than would typically be required within other public facilities. Some of that heating or cooling may be excessive, but the museum requires additional data before it can determine if that is the case.
Dionisi Vici has experience with automatically tracking climatic conditions around artwork. In fact, he designed a Bluetooth-based device attached to the back of the Mona Lisa, at the Louvre, in Paris, to measure and wirelessly transmit the temperature and humidity levels to which the famous painting was exposed.
At The Cloisters, however, Dionisi Vici’s challenge was to create a system that could potentially monitor the conditions around all of the facility’s artwork. To that end, he sought a wireless solution that would consume little power, for ease of installation and maintenance.
According to Dionisi Vici, IBM Research has developed a wireless low-power mote sensor system that it calls a “smarter planet solution,” intended to automate and better manage building climate control. “I got in touch with the IBM guys,” he says, “and said it would be nice to start with a smart-planet approach,” with the goal of targeting climate control to reduce the need for excessive heating or cooling.
Dionisi Vici began working with IBM Research in the summer of 2010, to develop a solution that could provide two functions: measuring temperatures and other conditions around the artwork, and providing enough data over time that the Met could then analyze variations in those conditions. IBM’s low-power motes each come with a radio chip, a micro-controller, batteries and sensor boards to support multiple sensors. The sensors transmit data at 2.4 GHz, using a proprietary air-interface protocol. Together, the motes create a mesh network, with one mote transmitting to another, and ultimately to a gateway reader wired to a computer.
Under ideal conditions, says Hendrik Hamann, a research manager at IBM Research, each mote can transmit and receive data at a distance of up to 300 to 500 yards; in this case, however, the motes were installed much closer to each other, in locations at which sensor data was required. Because the motes’ power consumption is extremely low, Hamann says, their battery life is five to eight years, depending on how frequently the motes transmit.
In March 2011, The Cloisters installed 100 sensors in approximately seven rooms, in order to measure the temperature, humidity and airflow levels within, as well air quality (measuring sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide, among other airborne compounds), door positions (using magnet sensors) and light levels. The motes were hidden behind artwork, within vents and in other strategic locations, to best measure air conditions. Because the motes are wireless, Hamann says, they were very simple to install—the installation required only two morning sessions, lasting two hours apiece.
Each mote measures the conditions, then forwards those measurements to cloud-based software running on a back-end server hosted by IBM Research. The software collects the data and applies 3-D models to determine airflow, and to ascertain the temperature and air conditions at a room’s high and low points (that is, points located near the ceiling, as well as along the floor). The software then analyzes the results, connecting such actions as the opening of a door, based on the magnet’s release, with fluctuations in conditions.
In addition, the system can issue alerts via e-mail in the event of an unusual measurement, thereby enabling the museum’s staff to immediately address a problem, such as an exceptionally high or low temperature.
IBM Research and the Metropolitan Museum of Art are sharing the cost of the system and its deployment. “It’s not uncommon for IBM Research to design a proof-point for a new technology at its own cost, in collaboration with a customer,” Hamann states.
The next phase, Dionisi Vici says, is to analyze the art’s status and determine how that may change, such as tracking any warping, changes to paint layers or other signs of strain. “If we can verify that the effect of wider variations [in the environmental conditions] is not harmful,” he says, the climate control can be adjusted accordingly.
With the motes in place for several months, Dionisi Vici says, the museum is still gathering data to be further analyzed in the future. The goal, he adds, is to monitor conditions throughout the entire museum. However, Dionisi Vici notes, the building is so structurally complex that the only way to achieve 100 percent coverage is to add a number of additional sensors.