• Development of instrumentation based on well known physical principles. This activity has been connected to medical and aqua culture applications, and is mainly motivated by the need for the measurement in other activities lacking other adequate instrumentation.
• Use of different off-the-shelf instruments as inputs to determine immeasurable variables. This activity is often called sensor fusion or use of cooperative sensor network. The incentive for this activity is partly to give a better description of a system and partly to replace or omit other instruments.
• Instrumentation system analysis concerning whether the instrumentation really are measuring the expected phenomena (is the instrument properly positioned, is the instrument under the influence of undesirable parameters), the robustness of the measurements and the need for the measurement.
• Wireless sensor networks for easy and flexible collection of measurements without the need for costly wiring.

The discipline of instrumentation as carried out at the institute is closely related to real time distributed systems, field bus communication and embedded systems, as advanced instrumentation often are implemented as distributed real time embedded systems, communicating by use of field buses.