Sensing the World with Mobile Devices: Nokia’s vision
Nokia’s latest white paper paints a picture of a connected global network based around the world’s most distributed and pervasive sensing instrument – the mobile phone. Thanks to an increasing number of built-in sensors – ambient light, orientation, acoustical, video, velocity, GPS - each device can capture, classify, and transmit many types of data with exceptional granularity. The perfect platform for sensing the world is already in our hands. If you only read one article today, this should be it.
Until now, sensor-based networks relied primarily on the ubiquitous placement of tiny fixed nodes to report on the physical world. These automatic systems required specially designed hardware, making them expensive and ultimately inflexible. Nokia has shifted the thinking about observational systems by promoting the mobile phone as a vastly more flexible—and broadly available—sensing method.
This device-centric approach quickly leads to a people-centric vision of sensor systems. By putting mobile phones in the hands of human participants, we can take advantage of users as creators, custodians, actuators, and publishers of the data they collect.
The white paper is available here.
