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Department of Information Technology

Participatory sensing

Participatory sensing is about ordinary people - equipped with today´s mobile + web technology - systematically observing, studying, reflecting on, and sharing your environment. Either passively by running some application that automatically collects data and upload it to a server. Or by having users actively collect, process and upload information. The strength lies in that everyone can participate in providing a useful service.

At UU we have worked with ordinary Android-based cellphones for data collection and opportunistic data forwarding. We envision an event-driven system where phones serve as a computing platform that react on events caused by e.g., user interaction, location, time of day, sensor data, external signals etc. Reaction to events can include collection, simple processing or transfer of data. Data flows from the point of collection to a relevant server where it becomes accessible for the rest of the Internet.

We are especially interested in applications were a large amount of people can collect data (e.g. Images, temperature, sound clips...) from a large outdoor area and then share it with topic-specific databases.

For this type of project, we work with legacy hardware and write software that when distributed to a set of ordinary phones will provide the service at hand.

Updated  2011-02-22 15:51:00 by Lars-Åke Larzon.