Contact: Dr. Eiman Kanjo, Cambridge Computer Lab
Mentors: Alan Cucknell & Pierre Far, Innovia Technology
Website: http://www.escience.cam.ac.uk/mobiledata/
The Cambridge Mobile Sensing research team has developed software and sensors that allow mobile and remote monitoring of a range of pollution, including chemical pollutants (carbon monoxide, nitrogen monoxide and nitrogen dioxide) and noise. The aim is to change environmental monitoring from an institutional activity to an individual activity where people are directly involved in gathering data on their own environments and reporting on any problems detected. Future work may also include a variety of health monitors and using bluetooth for proximity sensing applications.
The team has developed some unique portable sensors with wireless capabilities, which report their readings via a novel mobile phone application, and can also use the mobile phone itself as a noise sensor. They have developed the back-end systems needed to gather and analyse the data that is collected from the individual sensors. These systems need to be scalable to allow large numbers of people to carry sensors and for the results of this to be monitored in real-time.
The challenge for the i-Team is to investigate commercial applications for the monitoring system, and to suggest which types of monitoring might be of the greatest interest so that the researchers can focus their ongoing efforts appropriately.