10-11-2012, 04:35 PM
MobSens: Making Smart Phones Smarter
[attachment=38990]
Today’s mobile phones are smarter than ever: they now take and process pictures and videos, issue messages and email, access the Web, allow games on demand, and play music. More people around the world take their phones everywhere they go, using them in a variety of environments and situations to perform a whole range of different tasks. In India, for example, more people access the Internet from their phones than from a PC, a scenario that will certainly play out across the globe in the years to come.1
Most mobile phones include a variety of sensing components. By expanding this capability, we can derive some interesting sensing modalities—for example, scrutinizing local environments to detect and reduce pollution or using medical applications to tackle other problems on a societal scale.
In this article, we discuss experiences and lessons learned from deploying four mobile sensing applications on off-the-shelf mobile phones within a recreational framework called MobSens that contains elements of health, social, and environmental sensing at both individual and community levels. We describe the main components of our applications, which facilitate logging and external communications. We also outline the challenges faced when building and testing these applications and describe our strategies for overcoming them.
MobSens Prototypes
Mobile sensing—also known as “participatory sensing,”2 “urban sensing,”3 or “participatory urbanism”4—enables data collection from large numbers of people in ways that weren’t previously possible. Using mobile phones has several advantages over unattended wireless sensor networks for environmental sensing applications:
• Mobile phones can provide coverage where static sensors are hard to deploy and maintain, and large numbers of cell phones already exist around the world, providing the physical sensing infrastructure.
Mobile Experiences
We ultimately want a system that lets
users explore data and make informed
decisions about how they interact
with their environment, but it should
also enable nontechnical users to use
their mobile phones without specialist
knowledge in large-scale sensor data
collection in real time.
PollutionSpy
Our PollutionSpy application aims to
monitor air pollution in traffic by using
mobile phones to create a “pollution
map” of Cambridge, England. It also
promotes social networking in a local
community through the provision of
a Web portal that facilitates back-end
sharing of real-time environmental and
archived data.
PollutionSpy software creates a type
of Bluetooth personal network and can
connect up to seven different Bluetooth
devices. Within this network, the mobile
phone serves as the master, and
the other devices function as slaves.
So far, we’ve used this network to connect
mobile phones to pollution sensors
for CO, NO, NO2, CO2, and SO2 as
well as weather sensors for temperature
and wind speed. Upon connection,
the Bluetooth devices feed sensor
data tagged with locations to a log file
on the phone and display this collected
data graphically on the phone’s screen.
Users also have the option to transfer
the data to a remote database and
view it in real time on our GIS mapping
tools, which are embedded in a dedicated
Web interface.
[attachment=38990]
Today’s mobile phones are smarter than ever: they now take and process pictures and videos, issue messages and email, access the Web, allow games on demand, and play music. More people around the world take their phones everywhere they go, using them in a variety of environments and situations to perform a whole range of different tasks. In India, for example, more people access the Internet from their phones than from a PC, a scenario that will certainly play out across the globe in the years to come.1
Most mobile phones include a variety of sensing components. By expanding this capability, we can derive some interesting sensing modalities—for example, scrutinizing local environments to detect and reduce pollution or using medical applications to tackle other problems on a societal scale.
In this article, we discuss experiences and lessons learned from deploying four mobile sensing applications on off-the-shelf mobile phones within a recreational framework called MobSens that contains elements of health, social, and environmental sensing at both individual and community levels. We describe the main components of our applications, which facilitate logging and external communications. We also outline the challenges faced when building and testing these applications and describe our strategies for overcoming them.
MobSens Prototypes
Mobile sensing—also known as “participatory sensing,”2 “urban sensing,”3 or “participatory urbanism”4—enables data collection from large numbers of people in ways that weren’t previously possible. Using mobile phones has several advantages over unattended wireless sensor networks for environmental sensing applications:
• Mobile phones can provide coverage where static sensors are hard to deploy and maintain, and large numbers of cell phones already exist around the world, providing the physical sensing infrastructure.
Mobile Experiences
We ultimately want a system that lets
users explore data and make informed
decisions about how they interact
with their environment, but it should
also enable nontechnical users to use
their mobile phones without specialist
knowledge in large-scale sensor data
collection in real time.
PollutionSpy
Our PollutionSpy application aims to
monitor air pollution in traffic by using
mobile phones to create a “pollution
map” of Cambridge, England. It also
promotes social networking in a local
community through the provision of
a Web portal that facilitates back-end
sharing of real-time environmental and
archived data.
PollutionSpy software creates a type
of Bluetooth personal network and can
connect up to seven different Bluetooth
devices. Within this network, the mobile
phone serves as the master, and
the other devices function as slaves.
So far, we’ve used this network to connect
mobile phones to pollution sensors
for CO, NO, NO2, CO2, and SO2 as
well as weather sensors for temperature
and wind speed. Upon connection,
the Bluetooth devices feed sensor
data tagged with locations to a log file
on the phone and display this collected
data graphically on the phone’s screen.
Users also have the option to transfer
the data to a remote database and
view it in real time on our GIS mapping
tools, which are embedded in a dedicated
Web interface.