Participatory sensing for improving urban mobility

Abstract

Urban computing leverages mobile participatory and opportunistic sensing to monitor and provide continuous awareness of urban cities. CICESE Research Center offers students and staff an intra-campus transportation service called CICEMóvil to help them get around campus. However this service lacks of formality as trips are constantly being cancelled without previous notification and it's hard to discover when the vehicle is going to be available for the next trip. We present the design and development of a mobile augmented reality system using participatory and opportunistic sensing to empower users to track and share the location and status of CICEMóvil via their smartphones. We concluded discussing directions for future work, as we aim to study how participatory sensing could be used to promote self-reflection at a collective level through the design and evaluation of mobile sensing campaigns in public transportation. © Springer International Publishing 2013.