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Sensor-based networks and associated technologies hold the promise to help address important challenges such as protecting the environment including saving energy and rationalizing the consumption of natural resources, delivering health and elderly care, improving transportation safety and efficiency, or organizing response to natural disasters, increasing quality control and productivity through better monitoring of industrial and services production and distribution processes.

Sensors are fixed or mobile processing devices that measure or detect a real-world condition, such as motion, heat, light or location and convert the condition into an analogue or digital representation. "Sensor-based networks” are groups of sensors with a communications infrastructure intended to cooperatively monitor and record conditions at diverse locations.

Real-life applications using sensor-based networks are already implemented or being implemented but most applications are in the laboratory. Therefore we are at an ideal moment, before sensor-based networks become widespread, to address the technical, economic, and social issues this technology can raise and thus help create the conditions for their broader adoption. We are also at an ideal moment to consider the relationships between sensors and innovation.

The OECD Lisbon Experts Conference aims to help policy makers understand Sensor-Based Networks and their potential to help address global challenges. It will also explore the conditions for and consequences of innovation in this area including economic aspects, privacy and information security as well as infrastructure issues.

This conference follows-up on the 2008 OECD Ministerial Meeting on the Future of the Internet Economy where Ministers invited the OECD to "analyse the economic, social and cultural impacts of emerging Internet technologies, applications and services, including sensor-based networks" (Seoul Declaration). It will build on previous OECD work on RFID and on the High Level OECD Conference on "ICTs, the environment and Climate change" (Helsingør, Denmark, 27-28 May 2009).