Cambridge Mobile Urban Sensing

(CamMobSens)


CamMobSens is the Cambridge end of the MESSAGE project, a collaboration between Cambridge University, Imperial College London, Leeds University, Newcastle University and Southampton University. Note that MESSAGE finished on the 30th September 2009, and this page is a legacy of our work on that project.

In Cambridge we mount sensors on pedestrians and cyclists to monitor pollution and send back the information to a website as soon as it is gathered. In the figures below, pollution levels are proxied by the height of the plots.

carbon monoxide (CO)
nitrogen monoxide (NO)

Team members:

Prof. Jean Bacon, Department of Computer Science
Dr. Alastair Beresford, Department of Computer Science         
Dr. Mark Calleja, Cambridge eScience Centre
Mark Hayes, Cambridge eScience Centre 		Prof. Rod Jones, Department of Chemistry
Prof. Peter Landshoff, Department of Applied Mathematics
Dr. Iq Mead, Department of Chemistry
Michael Simmons, Cambridge eScience Centre


Here's a short, speeded up movie (1.9MB, MOV format) of someone with a nitrogen dioxide (NO2) sensor walking around Cambridge. The data is transmitted from the sensors via Bluetooth to Nokia mobile phones, for which we write Python applications under Symbian, and then via GPRS to a PostgreSQL database (some newer sensors can talk GPRS directly to the database). The data can then be extracted in KML format and displayed in Google Earth (as in the pictures and movie above).

A transcript and podcast of a BBC radio programme (The Naked Scientists) that covered this work can be found here, whereas a podcast for Radio 4's Click On programme can be found here (starts at about 7.5 minutes into the latter podcast).

For further information contact Mark Hayes mah1002@cam.ac.uk