Fresh: Cellid based mobile forum for community environmental awareness more

Fresh: Cell-ID based Mobile Forum for Community Environmental Awareness Eiman Kanjo University of Cambridge Computer Labratory Cambridge CB3 0FD ek315@cam.ac.uk 00441223 765292 ABSTRACT Peter Landshoff University of Cambridge CMS, Wilberforce Road Cambridge CB3 0WA pvl@damtp.cam.ac.uk This paper describes our mobile framework Fresh which engages the public in location sensitive experiences and in municipal monitoring of their environment, available both on users’ mobile phones, and online. This mobile forum is based on Cell-ID positioning and GPRS communications. It stores and receives information from a remote server which analyses and processes the scientific data received from a scalable mobile sensing framework called MobSens and makes it available to local communities through Fresh. Author Keywords allow people to discuss issues related to their local environment. This mobile utility (forum) will encourage users to interact at different locations and times to build a picture of their area and to reduce the carbon footprint in their environment by getting some advises from more experienced users. This mobile forum can quickly help users to discover whether anyone within the surrounding area is interested in environmental issues. In addition, users will be able to access environmental data such as pollution, noise, weather Using prompts to trigger information from users, the interface is a mobile phone tool to engage and encourage participation over time from multiple locations (Figure 1). and traffic information which are generated by a real-time and scalable mobile sensing system [2]. MobSens system is being developed by MESSAGE project [1] which enables individuals to monitor their local environment and their private spaces (e.g. activities and health) by using mobile phones in their day to day life. The MobSens is a combination of software components that facilitates the phone’s internal sensing devices (e.g. Microphone and camera) and external wireless sensors (e.g. data loggers and GPS receivers) for data collection. It also adds a new dimension of spatial localization to the data collection process and provides the user with both textual and spatial cartographic displays. While collecting the data, individuals can interactively add annotations and photos which are automatically transferred to a remote server (over GPRS connection). This makes it easy to visualize the data, photos and annotations on a spatial and temporal visualization tool and web interface. Fresh User Interface Mobile sensing, environmental monitoring, pervasive computing, location based applications, Urban computing, Social Network. INTRODUCTION Mobile phones provide us with sounds and imagery from our homes and neighbourhoods, and the wireless capability of these phones will allow us to search, publish or share environmental data easily and immediately. People will have access to a great diversity of sensors, allowing them to make even more detailed observations of their environments [2][3][4]. They will be able to cross-reference publicly available spatially and temporally data - traffic, weather, air quality, -within their vicinity and feel rhythms of their community. In this paper we describe our work in developing a mobile based social network called Fresh which utilise mobile and sensor networks power for the benefit of the environment. Fresh Fresh is a Mobile interface that utilizes GPRS networking and positioning using the cell-IDs from peoples’ phones to Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. UbiComp 2008, Sep 21-24, Seoul, South Korea. Workshops Proceedings. Copyright held by the authors. In Fresh, initially the world is empty but as the interaction is started the phone cell-ids fill with questions and answers which are asked by users who are trying to make their way across the city. Users can search their current location for any information about their local environment such as pollution level and weather information. Also they can look at a tagged questions and answers related to this location. They can choose to answer the question with a short text response. If they don’t find what they are looking for they could start a new discussion by dropping a question for others to answer. Finally, the on-line website allows users to look up information about any specific area they have been to. They can view where it has been, who answered their questions, the answers and any related discussion. Whenever a user starts the application they are prompted with a number of options: • to ask a variety of environmentally based questions regarding: o Traffic o Pollution o Weather information o Health problems to answer a variety of environmentally based questions which has been asked in this particular area (Cell-ID); to give advice regarding how to alter their behaviour and reduce their environmental footprint,; to view in their current physical area the latest (or latest maximum) measured pollution level tagged with location; to give a personalised user name (nick name) which they could use later to look up their input on the online interface. Implementing Fresh Fresh employs standard client-server architecture (Figure 2). The software application runs on a mobile phone, which is currently any of the Nokia Series 60 phones 3rd generation, it is written in Native Symbian C++ which is capable of the following: • • • logging the phone’s current Cell-ID; Providing user interface; Connecting to the server in real-time. • • Scoot (Traffic data) Weather information • Fresh DB MobileSens DB • Look-Up table of cell tower information Apache Server/PHP Scripts All their inputs are automatically associated with their current cell-IDs. Here are an example of some typical questions and answers of Fresh system: Q. Is there heavy traffic round here. A. Yes, many use this road to get to M11 Q. Is Girton very noisy? A. Yes, it is surrounded by A14 Q. Is bee population declining in this area? A. May be, farmers use insecticides excessively A. Yes, genetically modified crops can harm bees GPRS (POST/GET) Mobile Application Figure 2 Fresh System Architecture. The server component of the system runs on a standard Apache server with PHP and PostGreSql database. PHP is used to script the logic on the server with PostGreSql being used for persistent storage. Also the PostGIS plugin-tool of PostGreSql is used for spatial queries. As most mobile phone networks do not provide mobile phones with routable IP addresses, all communications requests must be initiated from the client side. These calls are sent from the client to the server over HTTP using POST and GET requests, with the parameters being passed within the data of the POST request. The reply is then used to update the state of the client application. POST is used to send information to the server such as users new questions and GET is used to obtain information from the server such as local traffic information. Information including user IDs, questions, answers, current location (cell-ID) and look-up table of cell-IDs data including Latitude and Longitude of each cell-tower (provided by O2) stored in the database along with the history of all previous answers and locations (Figure 3,3,4). Figure 1 Screenshots of the phone software. particular question or answer, and can continue to follow its progress as the interaction continues. By participating in this forum, we hope local communities will change their environmental behaviour toward sustainability, using the information that the system provides, and have an engaging, and enjoyable experience. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Figure 3 Overlay of O2 cell-IDs (in Cambridge) on Googlemaps We gratefully acknowledge the support of the EPRSC and Department of Transport for funding MESSAGE project. We are also grateful to O2 UK for providing unlimited GPRS airtime and the locations of their Cell Towers. REFERENCES 1. Cambridge Mobile Sensing, MESSAGE project. http://www.escience.cam.ac.uk/mobilesensing/. 2. Kanjo, E., Benford, S. MobGeoSen: Facilitating Personal GeoSensor Data Collection and Visualization using Mobile Phones. Personal Ubiquitous Computing Journal, Springer, (2007), ISSN 1617-4909 (Print) 1617-4917. Figure 4 Pollution map (Cambridge) based on Cell-IDs 3. Kanjo, E., Landshoff, P., 'Urban Computing and Mobile Devices,' IEEE Distributed Systems Online, vol. 8, no. 7, (2007), art. no. 0707-o7002. 4. Paulos, E., Handbook of Practice and Hershey, PA: Global. Edited press). Honicky, R.J. and Hooker, B. Research on Urban Informatics: The Promise of the Real-Time City. Information Science Reference, IGI by Marcus Foth, IGI Global, 2008 (in Figure 5 O2 Cell-IDs around Cambridge are labelled with friendly names. Author Biography The database is also linked to real-time pollution, noise, traffic, weather and environmental information stored in MobSens database which is part of MESSAGE project [1]. Future work and conclusion Dr Eiman Kanjo is a Researcher at the Computer Laboratory and Mathematical Sciences Centre at the University of Cambridge. She is also a member of Cambridge eScience Centre (CeSC). Her main research interest is in mobile and pervasive sensing. Prior to joining Cambridge University, Eiman worked at the MRL (Mixed Reality Lab), Computer Science, University of Nottingham in the area of Pervasive Computing, location based games and mobile development. She has also worked as a researcher and developer at the ICCAVE (the International Centre for Computer Games and Virtual Entertainment, Dundee) carrying out research work in the Interactive Toys and board Games project which is sponsored by the Scottish Enterprise under the Proof of Concept Programme. She earned her PhD from the Computer Science department, University of Abertay Dundee, UK, in the area of Pervasive and Tangible interfaces based on Computer Vision and Interactive TableTops in 2005. She is an ACM Professional Member, a reviewer to a number of conferences and journals and holds the patent “Object Tracking System”. Future developments will focus on the following: • • • • • • evaluate where, when, and why people participate; examine user behaviour and attitudes toward such systems; build context-based and interactive visualisation to draw a picture of this social network; allow users to interact with the system using media contents such as sound, image and video; extend Fresh to reward the users for their activities such as answering large number of question; investigate how to develop and deploy large-scale, mass-participatory pervasive systems; We also hope to further improve the web interface to allow users (or local authorities such as city council) to look up information about any questions and answered that they have encountered, whether created by themselves or by others. They can view where it has been, who has created a