Researchers can now keep an eye on their experiments via their mobile phones, thanks to a development to emerge from the CombeChem e-science project at Southampton University.
The CombeChem team has adapted IBM's award-winning software, WebSphere MQ, to act as a broker between sensors in the lab and the researchers' smart phones. The software picks up messages from the sensors, for example about changes to environmental conditions, and translates them into an XML format that any subscribing smart phone can receive. Because of its position between the application (sensor) and user (mobile phone), the software is known as middleware.
"The middleware layer transforms the communication," says Jeremy Frey, CombeChem project leader at Southampton University. "The publisher (sensor) talks to the broker (middleware) and the broker to the subscriber (mobile phone)."
Previously, remote sensing of experiments has been possible by writing bespoke software to connect each sensor to a specific remote monitor. The new middleware, however, generalises the process, allowing its application to a wide range of experimental conditions and uses with little programming effort on the part of the experimenter.
Dr Frey has been using it to monitor highly sensitive laser spectroscopy experiments that need to be remotely controlled to avoid disturbance by an observer. The experiments are part of the CombeChem project which is developing new ways of using Grid technology to automate the search for novel chemical structures with potentially important properties. "Chemists, like everyone else, sometimes need refreshment but don't want this to get in the way of doing experiments. We can now go off for lunch and keep tabs on what's going on in the lab," says Dr Frey.
IBM's Hursley Laboratory near Winchester, UK, originally developed WebSphere MQ in the early 1990s to allow computers using incompatible computing languages to communicate with each other. WebSphere is now used by major companies worldwide and is behind many aspects of e-commerce including internet banking and the control of supermarket supply chains.
CombeChem is one of its first applications to scientific research. "WebSphere is a great enabler for e-science," says Andy Stanford-Clark, IBM's manager of pervasive messaging technologies. "It can be used to monitor any scientific experiment that uses sensors through the web, a mobile phone or a PDA. It's very simple – that's the beauty of it. It's a messaging layer on to which you can write any application."
Contact:
Dr Jeremy Frey
Further information:
http://www.combechem.org
http://www-306.ibm.com/software/websphere