A Support Infrastructure for the Smart Kindergarten C ontinuing progress in microelectronics has allowed the embedding of sensing, processing, and wireless communications capabilities in familiar physical objects. This enables the creation of smart environments, where communication and computation technologies facilitate interactions between people and their surroundings, instead of just person-to-person or person-to-server communication. In a collaborative project underway at the University of California, Los Angeles, called Smart Kindergarten (SmartKG), 1 we are exploring these technologies in a sensor-instrumented environment for early childhood education. Spatially dense but unobtrusive sensors continually capture interactions among students, teachers, and common classroom objects. The sensors deliver observations wirelessly to a wired infrastructure for analysis and storage. Two crucial building blocks of this environment are Sylph, a sensor middleware infrastructure, and iBadge, a lightweight sensor-instrumented badge worn by students and teachers.

Baseball has gained popularity at Taiwanese colleges over the last twenty years. The quality of coaching and training is the key factor in the performance of young players during competition. Wireless sensor network (WSN) technology has been developed to index, navigate, store, and analyze data in sports. We investigated the correlations between the performance of college baseball players during a competition game and the following three factors: (1) athletes' physical fitness, (2) athletes' psychological state, and (3) the training environment. Wireless wearable devices were applied in this research to construct the indicators for monitoring the development of players in terms of the three aforementioned factors during routine training. The statistics software SPSS 20.0 was employed to test the correlations between the factors raised in this present research. The findings showed (1) correlations among the physical fitness, psychological state, and training environment and (2) correlations between the effect of training on the competition event performance of baseball players during a competition event and the physical fitness, psychological state, and training environment. In the future, the above indicators can be applied to wearable sensing devices to enhance the effect of training on the performance of the players.