Science Blog ZINC PROJECTS
Citizen science in environmental sensing with mobile phones
Date: 08-Jun-09
Author: Center for Embedded Networked Sensing
UCLA researchers unveiled a new tool to help people understand their relationship with the environment. The Personal Environmental Impact Report (PEIR) lets users see online how their daily choices affect the environment and how the environment affects them, by providing personalized, daily estimates of measures like particulate matter exposure on roadways and carbon emissions due to driving.
PEIR estimates impact and exposure using the actual travel patterns of its users, as uploaded from their GPS-equipped mobile phones.
On the PEIR site, users can compare values for different trips and see how lifestyle changes affect their impact and exposure. They can also compare their averages with other PEIR participants in their Facebook social network.
By employing only the increasingly common location sensing capabilities of modern phones, CENS wants PEIR and projects like it to work on the devices that people already own and use.
Courtesy: Apple
PEIR was developed by the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS) at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science in collaboration with the Nokia Research Center, Palo Alto.
Full story: UCLA Researchers Create Personal Environmental Impact Reports Using Cell Phones as Sensors
Related links:
• Personal Environmental Impact Report (PEIR) • Cell Phones Allow Everyone to Be a Scientist • Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS)
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