Cellphones for Science
From IEEE Spectrum:
Being at the right place with a camera phone can make anyone an amateur reporter nowadays. How about turning cellphone users into amateur scientists? Cellphones can take pictures, record sounds, reveal location, and even measure temperature and sense light. And they are everywhere—there are more than 260 million subscribers in the United States alone. So cellphones seem an ideal tool for collecting research data, according to Eric Paulos, assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute, in Pittsburgh.
Paulos has lofty goals. He wants to incorporate various environment sensors into cellphones. Everyday cellphone users would then become “citizen scientists,” measuring temperature, wind speed, pollen count, or air pollution levels and sharing the data with researchers. He will be presenting his ideas next month at the ETech 2009 conference in San Jose, Calif.
http://research.nokia.com/files/insight/NTI_Nanoscience_-_Dec_2008.pdf