People spend approximately 90 percent of their time indoors. A critically important aspect of creating and maintaining safe work and home environments is the issue of indoor air quality (IAQ). In the residential sector, solid fuels is the major major contributor to indoor air pollution. Indoor smoke contains a range of health-damaging pollutants, such as small particles and carbon monoxide, and particulate pollution levels may be 20 times higher than accepted guideline values. This project will develop a platform for effective monitoring of key IAQ parameters necessary to support complete building comfort as well as provide healthy and productive environment. The proposed system will incorporate a wireless sensor network technology coupled with an appropriate interface designed to collect and represent the monitored data in a manner that may be easily understood and interpreted by a user. The main outcome of this research will be the specification, analysis and implementation of efficient control and optimisation algorithms for effective monitoring and control of indoor air quality in buildings.

Ireland, as an island nation, is highly reliant on its sea ports for import and export of goods and materials. The impetus for this project stemmed from a desire to improve the workings of these ports using simulation and optimisation of its workings. Primarily we sought to minimise the time taken to load cargo onto ships given parameters such as the speed and capacity of cranes and the expected arrival and desired departure times of ships from the port. This was developed with the implementation of considered algorithms and heuristics. Furthermore, through a graphical user interface "what if" scenarios could be simulated to determine the effect on timings. For example, what would the effect of an increased capacity crane be? This software development sought to aid answering these questions. Given the significance of the sea port service to the Irish economy the focus of this application was to provide an insight to port mangers and logistics teams to the true capability of their operations in a cost effective manner through the optimised ordering of cargo handling and the simulation of hypothetical scenarios.

In team sports, the ability to monitor an individual player's physiological data is extremely useful both for the coach and from a safety perspective. The smart hurling helmet utilizes various sensors embedded within the helmet to measure the player's heart rate and blood oxygen concentration (Sp02), and also to measure the severity of head impacts. This information is then sent wirelessly via an ISM-band RF transmitter located in the helmet. A coach or doctor on the sideline can then view this information on a laptop, and make critical decisions on the player's safety. For this internship, the Smart Helmet's receiver was interfaced to PDA which removes the need to carry a bulky laptop to the sideline of the playing pitch. An application running on the PDA displays current physiological data, as well as logging it to a Matlab file for later viewing and analysis. A vibration function was also introduced into the Smart Helmet's receiver. If, for example, a severe impact is received by a player which may result in a concussion, the receiver will vibrate to alert the coach or doctor on the sideline. Thus the need to constantly monitor a screen is removed. To achieve this, the code running on the PIC microcontroller in the helmet's receiver needed to be re-written.