Computer scientists in Cambridge, UK, are using bike couriers to monitor air pollution. These couriers are doing their usual jobs, but their bicycles are equipped with air-pollution sensors and GPS units that connect to their cellphones via Bluetooth. So their phones are constantly reporting the levels of carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide, and nitrogen dioxide in the area. And back in the lab, servers are updating a Google map for Internet users and regular cellphone users. The sensors used for this project could also be fixed to a pedestrian's jacket, which means that everybody in the area could become a pollution tracker.
You can see on the left one of the Cambridge cycle couriers used by the Cambridge Mobile Urban Sensing project. (Credit: Outspoken Delivery) This Cambridge Mobile Urban Sensing (CamMobSens) project is led by Eiman Kanjo, a Research Associate in the University of Cambridge.
Here is an excerpt from the New Scientist article. "The sensors are carried inside storage bins on the couriers' bikes and record levels of carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide, and nitrogen dioxide. After initial trials, the pollution sensor has been made smaller, more accurate, and able to detect carbon dioxide too. 'It is about the size of a TV remote control, we should start new trials in a few weeks,' says Kanjo. The same sensor can be fixed to a pedestrian's jacket or bag, she adds -- one possibility is giving them to traffic wardens in the city.
And what will come next? "In future it may be possible to combine the GPS unit with the sensors, or take advantage of phones with built-in GPS. 'Phones now are not accurate enough,' says Kanjo, 'I expect they will improve, so that won't be a problem in future.' The system was developed with help from phone manufacturer Nokia and telecoms provider O2."
The CamMobSens initiative is only one of the ideas explored by MESSAGE (short for "Mobile Environmental Sensing System Across Grid Environments"), a three-year research project which started in October 2006 and is funded jointly by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and the Department for Transport.
Here are some details taken from the project overview. "The project will develop and demonstrate the potential of diverse, low cost sensors to provide data for the planning, management and control of the environmental impacts of transport activity at urban, regional and national level. This includes their implementation on vehicles and people to act as mobile, real-time environmental probes, sensing transport and non-transport related pollutants and hazards. Three sensor platforms will be developed as part of the project. Cambridge will investigate the potential for personal devices (mobile phones) to support a sensing system. Newcastle will develop a 'smart-dust' network using Zigbee (IEEE 802.15.4) motes, while Imperial will devise a network that utilises WiFi (IEEE 802.11.g) and WiMax (IEEE 802.16) technologies for communications and positioning, and a set of novel sensor designs."
For more information about the MESSAGE project, you can read this poster or this page about Pervasive Mobile Environmental Sensor Grids.
And fore more details about the CamMobSens initiative, please read the project homepage and follow the links on the left.
This project has also been described in a "Urban Computing" special issue of IEEE Pervasive Computing (Volume 8, Number 7, July–September 2007). Here are two links to the abstract, Urban Computing and Mobile Devices, and to a description of 12 works in progress (PDF format, 6 pages, 287 KB).
On page 3 of this document, you'll find how Eiman Kanjo and Peter Lanshoff describe how mobile phones can monitor pollution. "At the University of Cambridge, we're exploring the sensing capabilities of built-in devices in modern mobile phones, which can give ordinary people the ability to affordably monitor their local environments. To achieve this, we're developing accurate and miniaturized pollution-monitoring sensors to communicate with mobile phones and GPS receivers over Bluetooth. Mobile phones will act as data-collection points for processing and mapping surrounding pollution levels."
Sources: Tom Simonite, New Scientist, January 2, 2008; and various websites
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