Synopsis:
Wireless sensor networks could advance many scientific pursuits while providing a vehicle for enhancing various forms of productivity, including manufacturing, agriculture, construction, and transportation.

                      and a couple of quotes:

SENSOR NETWORK APPLICATIONS

"Although computer-based instrumentation has existed for a long time, the density of instrumentation made possible by a shift to mass-produced intelligent sensors and the use of pervasive networking technology gives WSNs a new kind of scope that can be applied to a wide range of uses. These can be roughly differentiated into

• monitoring space,
• monitoring things, and
• monitoring the interactions of things with each other and the encompassing space.

The first category includes environmental and habitat monitoring, precision agriculture, indoor climate control, surveillance, treaty verification, and intelligent alarms. The second includes structural monitoring, ecophysiology, condition-based equipment maintenance, medical diagnostics, and urban terrain mapping. The most dramatic applications involve monitoring complex interactions, including wildlife habitats, disaster management, emergency response, ubiquitous computing environments, asset tracking, healthcare, and manufacturing process flow."

......

"The individual devices in a wireless sensor network (WSN) are inherently resource constrained: They have limited processing speed, storage capacity, and communication bandwidth. These devices have substantial processing capability in the aggregate, but not individually, so we must combine their many vantage points on the physical phenomena within the network itself."

<empahsis added - In my view, the need for Complex Event Processing  is lurking here,  of course >