New from the SMARTER team - the Sensor Common Metadata Specification (SCMS) v4.0 has been released and is available for public comment. Development is progressing well and feedback from the sensor community during the recent Air Sensors International Conference (ASIC) has informed both the specification and the SMARTER Sensor Library user interface. Our shapelet work has expanded from infrastructure development into three applied studies, and we are looking forward to meeting up with the research community at the International Society of Exposure Science (ISES) meetings and International Society of Environmental Epidemiology (IEEE) meetings this fall.

Read on for more details on these activities and more, along with some information on how SMARTER supports indoor air quality research. As always, we are grateful for the support of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) and the ongoing input of our Expert Panel.

Sensor Common Metadata Specification (SCMS): Version 4.0

We released SCMS v4.0 on 09/02/2026 and it is currently open for public comment. Three significant additions in this release resulted from the scoping review, researcher interviews, and expert panel input:

Measurements / data origin — documenting where a given measurement comes from, now captured in the metadata repository.
Minimum detection limit (MDL) — the smallest signal an instrument can reliably detect, added to the metadata repository so researchers can judge whether a sensor is suited to the concentrations they expect to encounter.
Version tracking — instruments and sensors change across iterations, and the specification now accounts for that. The metadata repository stores a version history rather than overwriting older records, and the Sensor Library displays specifications for the current version with a link to earlier ones.

Version	Release Date	Status
v1.0	November 2024	Released — initial expert panel review
v2.0	April 2025	Released — expert panel feedback and and public comment incorporated
v3.0	September 2025	Released — expert panel feedback and public comment incorporated
v4.0	September 2026	Released — open for public comment

Upcoming: ISES 2026, Vancouver

The SMARTER team will be at the International Society of Exposure Science (ISES) 2026 Annual Meeting, October 4–8, 2026, in Vancouver, Canada. This year's meeting is themed "The Exposome in Action: Collaborative Science for Healthier People and Stronger Communities."

We will host a booth at the Exposure Science Technology Fair, where we will demonstrate the SMARTER Sensor Library and gather input from attendees. If you are attending, we would welcome the chance to show you the tool and hear how it fits your work.

All presentations will take place at ISES 2026, October 4 to 8, 2026, at the Sheraton Vancouver Wall Centre in Vancouver, Canada. Dates, times, and meeting room details will be announced shortly.

Presentation	Presenter(s)
Oral: Evaluating Semantic Ontology Coverage for Sensor Metadata Specifications in Exposure Health Research: Gaps and Recommendations	Ram Gouripeddi, Mollie Cummins
Oral: A Library of Temporal Motifs for Machine Learning-base Exposure Characterization	Ram Gouripeddi, Mollie Cummins
Oral: Sensor Metadata Tools and Resources for AI-Ready, FAIR Exposure Health Data: The SMARTER Project	Ram Gouripeddi, Mollie Cummins
Oral: Advancing Exposomics: A Spatio-Temporal Event Modeling Architecture for Integrating and Assimilating Real-world Exposure and Clinical Data	Ram Gouripeddi, Mollie Cummins
Oral: A Decentralized Graph-of-Graphs Metadata Ecosystem for Advancing Interoperable Exposure Science	Ram Gouripeddi, Mollie Cummins
Poster: Integrating the Exposome into Translational Research via Coupled Environmental and Human Digital Twins Architectures	Ram Gouripeddi, Mollie Cummins

Shapelets

Work on the shapelet library, a reusable, freely available collection of temporal patterns for exposure health research, has advanced on two fronts this period: applied studies putting the library to work, and infrastructure making it usable by others.

Applied studies

Air pollution and suicide incidence. Using the shapelet library to examine whether population-level changes in air pollution and environmental exposure patterns are associated with suicide incidence. Amanda Bakian will present this work at the International Society of Environmental Epidemiology (ISEE) 2026 meeting in Munich, Germany, August 30 – September 2, 2026.
Hypersensitivity pneumonitis (HP). Matching patients' historical environmental exposures against shapelets to investigate whether specific NO₂, PM2.5, and O₃ patterns are associated with fibrotic versus non-fibrotic HP.
Environmental conditions and athletic performance. Applying environmental shapelets to Salt Lake Bees games, examining how pollution and weather patterns around game time relate to player performance.

Infrastructure

The team has developed pipelines for shapelet extraction, matching, clustering, visualization, and querying of the shapelet library, making the resource usable across study designs rather than tied to any single analysis.

SMARTER Sensor Library Development

SMARTER Neo4j:

SMARTER has a Neo4j graph database setup that models the MDR data as connected nodes and relationships. The workflow reads the structured Excel template, runs sanity checks and sheet-level validation, and generates Cypher scripts to load the graph into Neo4j. Separate generator modules handle the core entities and relationship links, giving us a structured graph model for the MDR data.

SMARTER Backend:

Over the past few months, SMARTER has continued to improve the core platform behind the API, with updates across development, security, testing, and deployment. We strengthened the REST API by adding and refining endpoints for sensor browsing, search, and instrument details, while also improving authentication through Keycloak and OAuth-based access control. We also expanded unit test coverage, added better logging for easier troubleshooting, and continued improving CI/CD and deployment workflows to support smoother development and release cycles. Together, these updates help make SMARTER more reliable, easier to maintain, and better prepared for future growth.

SMARTER UI:

The UI work focused on improving the front-end architecture and interaction flow to make the application more maintainable, responsive, and intuitive. We refined component structure, tightened state management, and improved the browse, search, and filtering experiences to support smoother product discovery. We also enhanced layout consistency, spacing, and responsive behavior across screen sizes, while fixing key interface issues to improve reliability and overall usability. The result is a cleaner, more stable UI foundation that is easier to extend and better aligned with day-to-day user workflows.

How SMARTER Supports Indoor Air Quality Research

People spend the majority of their time indoors, yet the instruments, deployment practices, and data characteristics of indoor air quality (IAQ) monitoring differ substantially from those of outdoor monitoring. The SMARTER project (Sensors and Metadata for Analytics and Research in Exposure Health) was designed from the outset to support both. Rather than treating indoor measurement as a special case, the Sensor Common Metadata Specification (SCMS) that underpins SMARTER makes the indoor/outdoor distinction an explicit, computable attribute at every stage of the sensor lifecycle: whether an instrument is intended for indoor use, outdoor use, or both; whether a given deployment actually took place indoors or outdoors; and whether the resulting measurements were collected indoors, outdoors, or across both. The specification also captures the micro-environment in which data were collected (home, work, school, transportation) so that indoor measurements carry the contextual detail investigators need to interpret and reuse them.

This design carries directly into the SMARTER Sensor Library, the researcher-facing tool for discovering and comparing instruments. Investigators can filter by deployment condition (indoor only, outdoor only, indoor/outdoor, harsh conditions, and wearables) and then narrow by the characteristics that matter most when equipping an indoor study, among them measured entities, collection method, power source, data connectivity, continuous operation time, and degree of participant interaction. Someone planning a residential PM2.5 or VOC study can move from "what can I use indoors?" to a short list of candidates, review detailed profiles, and compare up to four instruments side by side with differences highlighted. Field notes contributed by other researchers add practical guidance that manufacturer specifications rarely provide. The Library remains under development and is not yet publicly hosted, though it has been demonstrated at venues including the Air Sensors International Conference.

Behind the Library, the SMARTER Metadata Repository stores this information across the three SCMS domains of Instrument, Deployment, and Output, so that indoor sensor metadata is retained not only as a hardware description but as a full account of how a device was used and what it produced. The Deployment domain is especially consequential for IAQ work, capturing setup height and reference level, the structure and mount an instrument was installed on, mobility, whether the device was personal, wearable, or portable, and the associated calibration and maintenance history. Because the repository is graph-based and sensor-agnostic, it accommodates novel instruments and configurations, including hierarchical devices that bundle multiple sensors, without redesigning the underlying model. Combined with a specification revised iteratively through expert panel review and public comment, and a Library that invites researchers to contribute metadata for instruments not yet represented, SMARTER is designed to keep pace with a rapidly evolving indoor sensing landscape.

Presentations at Scientific Conferences

Feedback from the sensor community at ASIC 2026.

Several days of conversation at our booth in Los Angeles gave us a clear sense of what researchers, technicians, and manufacturers want from the Sensor Library. The comparison tool drew the most interest, along with requests to make it easier to read at a glance: color-coding, clearer difference highlighting, and filters for target use case. Attendees also pushed on transparency about whether a measurement is direct or derived, and analysts asked for CSV export of metadata across multiple monitors.

Community notes came up as a real differentiator, offering practical experience that doesn't appear on a spec sheet, though sustaining those contributions over time remains the open question. Several manufacturers expressed interest in contributing metadata and taking part in testing. Some of this is already reflected in SCMS v4.0 and the current build; the rest is shaping our roadmap.

Poster presentations at AMIA 2026.

The team presented four posters at the AMIA Amplify Informatics Conference in Denver, covering the shapelet primitives library, NLP-driven sensor metadata extraction, the sensor reporting scoping review, and the user-centered design of the Sensor Library.

SMARTER team members at AMIA, Denver 2026

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The University of Utah SMARTER Project is funded by the National Institutes of Health, National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences (“Community-Driven Sensor Metadata Ecosystem for Exposure Health“, 1R24ES036134-01, Multi-Principal Investigators Ramkiran Gouripeddi & Mollie R. Cummins). The content of this web site is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the University of Utah or the National Institutes of Health.

SMARTER Updates - August/September 2026