The expansion of complex autonomous sensing and control mechanisms in the Internet-of-Things systems clashes with constraints on computation and wireless communication resources. In this paper, we propose a framework to address this conflict for applications in which resolution using a centralized architecture with a general-purpose compression of observations is not appropriate. Three approaches for distributing observation detection workload between sensing and processing devices are considered for sensor systems within wireless islands. Each of the approaches is formulated for the shared configuration of a sensor-edge system, in which the network structure, observation monitoring problem, and machine learning-based detector implementing it are not modified. For every approach, a high-level strategy for realization of the detector for different assumptions on the relation between its complexity and the system's constraints is considered. In each case, the potential for the constraints' satisfaction is shown to exist and be exploitable via division, approximation, and delegation of the detector's workload to the sensing devices off the edge processor. We present examples of applications that benefit from the proposed approaches.