Citizen-friendly participatory campaign support

Abstract

Participatory sensing, which appropriates wearable devices such as mobile phones to enable ad-hoc, person-centric mobile sensing networks, has the potential of delivering datasets with high spatio-temporal granularity. We argue that to obtain such datasets the concept of a participatory campaign, a recipe for gathering data to answer a particular concern, is essential, and that technological support for organising such campaigns is currently lacking. Campaign support is crucial to ensure that a dataset of adequate quality is gathered to study the concern under consideration, and additionally, to empower communities by providing them with a tool to answer local concerns and set up grassroots sensing actions without having to wait for an institutionalised action to take place. In this article we present a proof-of-concept architecture for participatory campaigns. The latter is built upon a formal definition of a campaign and the description of a campaign lifecycle, both of which are distilled out of earlier expertise with and related work on organising participatory sensing campaigns.

Deviation Prediction and Correction on Low-Cost Atmospheric Pressure Sensors using a Machine-Learning Algorithm

“…Low-cost environmental sensors have enabled individuals to build and manage their own monitoring system not only by its lower price, but also due to its easy availability and extended technical support. Therefore, when engaged individuals share a common concern, such as the quality of the environment, those particular monitoring artefacts, together, can be part of a collaborative monitoring system (Goldman et al, 2009;Zaman et al, 2014). Collaborative sensing, either mobile or not, can be helpful as a complementary tool in several fields of study, such as biology (Kanhere, 2011), urban environment and weather and local climate (D'Hondt et al, 2013;Young et al, 2014).…”

An Algorithm to Coordinate Measurements Using Stochastic Human Mobility Patterns in Large-Scale Participatory Sensing Settings

“…A large-scale participatory sens-ing campaign can expect many hundreds or even thousands of people depending on the city and the nature of the phenomenon being monitored. The need for a coordination system is also highlighted in the work of (Zaman et al 2014;D'Hondt et al 2014), but they focus on receiving feedback from participants rather than actively coordinating their measurements.…”

A flow-based programming framework for mobile App development

“…If a user wants slighty different functionality (e.g., collect different types of data), an app needs to be build from scratch. An interesting observation from our earlier work [6,13] is that PS solutions all share a similar aspect from a technological point of view: they typically consist of a combination of a mobile app that collects a type of data, a web app that visualises the collected data and underlying database to persistently store all the collected data. The only thing that differs between solutions is the actual type of data being gathered.…”