The Landscape of Pervasive & Mobile Computing Standards Sumi Helal Synthesis Lectures on Mobile and Pervasive Computing Preface

13.7 Re aching into People’s Pockets

with mainstream sensor network research, a new sensor platform has slowly emerged from a totally different application domain that’s familiar to billions of people around the world. This new sensor platform is the mobile phone. Initially designed for

facilitating voice communications anytime and anywhere, mobile phones have increasingly taken the role of mobile computers with rapidly increasing sensing capabilities (see Figure 13.5). A mobile phone today has all the basic capabilities of a sensor platform, namely communications, processing, and sensing. In fact, almost every new mobile phone launched today carries a small but representative set of sensors such as GPS, temperature sensor, accelerometer and light level sensor. In addition numerous other sensors such as RFID are available as add-ons. Unlike the resource-constrained sensor platforms of yesteryears that were only capable of simple applications, mobile smart phones are essentially small computers with all the advantages of powerful processing capabilities, relatively large storage, rapid application development tools and the ability to run multiple complex applications on the same platform. And last but not least, people are intimately familiar with the platform. Hence, mobile phones are becoming the sensor platform of choice for many areas of research and application domains, especially those outside the realm of traditional sensor networking research.

13.8 Health and Fitness Monitoring

One such application domain is the personal user space where sensor platforms provide personalized sensingbased applications to individual users. An example is the Nokia Sports Tracker (see Figure 13.6). The Nokia Sports Tracker is a GPS-based activity tracker (http://sportstracker.nokia.com) running on Nokia S60 phones that tracks the user’s route, speed and timing for activities such as running, jogging or cycling. It also utilizes the phone’s accelerometer sensor to count the number of steps taken during the exercise. All this data is utilized to compute statistics such as energy expenditure and enables users to upload route information, associated photos, videos, and workout statistics to social networking Web sites.

13.9 Crisis and Emergency Response

An application domain which has seen a significant push for mobile phones being used as sensor platforms is crisis and emergency response. The NSFfunded Responding to Crises and Unexpected Events (RESCUE) project4 being undertaken by the Universities of California at Irvine and San Diego is a major effort in that direction. In this project, researchers postulate the concept of “human-as-a-sensor” where emergency rescue workers and first responders carry mobile phones (in addition to radios) to collectively improve situational awareness of an incident. The mobile phones are equipped with a number of sensors for measuring environmental parameters and responder’s vital signs and continuously transmit that data to a centralized backend that’s fused with data from other responders and analyzed. The plan is also to equip the phones with multiple communication interfaces to let them fuse additional data from in-situ sensors (such as Smart Dust) to maximize situational awareness.



Figure 13.6 Nokia Sports Tracker running on a N95 mobile phone.It utilizes the basic set of sensors available on the smartphone to monitor and log the user’s activity levels and exercise workout routines. This information can be shared and collated via social networking sites and other innovative Web 2.0 applications.

13.10 Mobile Environmental Sensing

Another application domain where mobile phone based sensing is gaining increasing acceptance is environmental sensing, in particular pollution tracking. One such project is Cambridge Mobile Urban Sensing by Cambridge University (http://www.escience.cam.ac.uk/mobiledata). Mobile phones equipped with air pollution sensors and GPS are used as data-collection points for sensing and mapping pollution levels in their users’ local surroundings. Data from multiple phones are fused and processed to provide a comprehensive picture of pollution in various parts of the city, at various times. Researchers can link this data with health statistics and other parameters to determine pollution effects on the local weather, incidence of airborne diseases and living conditions in specific neighborhoods. The Common Sense project at Intel Research Berkeley (http://citizensensing.org/) is currently working on development of mobile sensing platforms as tools for supporting community action and citizen science. Researchers are utilizing mobile phones as personal environmental sensors which allow common citizens to collect pollution data in their neighborhoods and actively influence environmental regulations and policies (see Figure 13.7). Mobile sensing platforms such as the smartphone will likely continue to become the sensor platform of choice and drive novel applications utilizing ad-hoc collaborations (if not ad-hoc networking) between locally clustered and geographically distributed nodes, in the personal, social, scientific, medical and business domains. Another trend which will likely manifest itself in the near future is the nomadic interoperability of mobile sensing platforms with other intelligent environments. Body sensors will probably also gain a



Figure 13.7 Environmental sensing platform developed at Intel Research Berkeley. The sensor platform is built around a Nokia N95 smartphone connected to external sensing boards.

lot of acceptance, especially with the widespread adoption of mobile phones as sensing platforms, and we might eventually see human beings transforming into the ultimate sensor platform. Therefore, exciting times are ahead for sensor platform and sensor network research with multiple disciplines converging to drive radical new paradigms for sensing hardware, software and applications.

chapter 14

War of the Mobile Browsers

Abstract

Mobile web browsers have substantially evolved to a level in which wireless applications enrich user experience beyond a desktop environment. Server-transcoding and client rendering are paradigms found to enable the wireless web, additionally open platforms provide applications developers with extensions to expand the future of mobile software.

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