http://www.coe.berkeley.edu/labnotes/0805/honicky.html
Cell phone as sensor
by David Pescovitz
Graduate student R.J. Honicky spent last summer in Uganda as a
Berkeley-United Nations Industrial Development Organization fellow.
He works with his co-adviser Eric Brewer on the Technology and
Infrastructure for Emerging Regions (TIER) project. (Peg Skorpinski
photo)
Right now, there are hundreds of millions of cell phones in use
around the world. According to UC Berkeley computer science graduate
student R.J. Honicky, the ubiquity of those devices could be
leveraged to help reduce pollution, fight disease, and tackle other
societal scale problems with no additional effort on the part of the
person carrying the phone. The key is outfitting newly manufactured
cell phones with inexpensive environmental sensors.
"By their sheer numbers, cell phones provide an opportunity to gather
geospatial data with much higher granularity and more penetration
than previously possible," says Honicky, who is developing such a
system with College of Engineering dean Richard Newton. "This is
especially true in the developing world, where there's often a lack
of funds for scientific research."
The cell phone-as-sensor approach weaves together two valuable
approaches to data gathering. Wireless sensor networks consisting of
hundreds or thousands of individual nodes have emerged as a new kind
of "instrument," capable of gathering great amounts of data that can
then be aggregated and analyzed. But in many locations, particularly
within developing nations, the deployment of large- scale sensor
networks is cost prohibitive. On the other hand, leveraging existing
cell phone networks into a wireless infrastructure makes perfect
sense, Honicky says.
"Cell phones have a huge economy of scale," he says. "The cost to add
a sensor to a handset is marginal compared to the entire
manufacturing cost of the phone."
Many mobile phones systems are also equipped with technology that
tracks location, either via GPS receivers in the handsets or
technology within the cellular network. The ability to identify where
in the world a bit of data was found is the basis of geographic
information systems (GIS), highly useful tools for collecting,
organizing, mapping, and understanding data within the context of
location.
"When you can visualize data with fine granularity in a spatial
context, oftentimes you can clearly pinpoint problem areas and
suggest good solutions," Honicky says.
In recent years, scientists have used GIS to track the endemicity of
malaria, and contain river blindness, a human disease caused by a
parasite and spread by blackfly bites in South America and southern
Africa .
"If you can figure out where the disease is coming from, you can do
targeted sprayings of larvicides and slow the spread with much less
environmental impact," Honicky explains. "The phones will allow
scientists to gather similar kinds of geospatial data without the
expense of typical GIS development and maintenance.”
Already, Honicky has demonstrated a simple proof-of-concept
application for the UC Berkeley campus. As he walks around campus,
his handset monitors the strength of the wireless signal at its
current location and transmits that data to a central server. The
information is then displayed graphically as a map of cell phone
signal strength across the campus.
Meanwhile, electrical engineering and computer sciences professor
Richard White, mechanical engineering department chair Albert Pisano,
graduate student Jonathan Rheaume, and David Walther, a research
engineer with the Berkeley Sensor and Actuator Sensor Center , are
launching an effort to develop a carbon monoxide sensor for cell
phones. Eventually, a combination cell phone/CO detector could enable
environmental scientists to monitor and track pollution across
densely populated urban centers.
Once Honicky and Newton determine if their system will scale to
millions of users, the next step is to convince manufacturers to
participate. Honicky hopes that incentive will come from the
opportunity to do well by doing good. And once the potential privacy
concerns about tracking the location of users are worked out, he's
convinced that the public will be eager to join in.
"I think the biggest driver for individuals is that they get to
participate in a social cause," he says. "That's especially true if
they know that just by carrying around cell phones they could, for
example, potentially help scientists understand and hopefully reduce
pollution around their homes."
---
You are currently subscribed to telecom-cities as: archive@mail-archive.com
To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To set DIGEST mode and only receive one list message per day with all the daily
traffic, please visit the list website at
http://www.informationcity.org/telecom-cities
