Abstract
In recent years, the use of mobile phones and tablets for personal communication has increased dramatically, with over 1 billion smartphones out of a total of 5 billion mobile phones worldwide. The infrastructure and technology underlying these devices has improved to a level where it is now possible to integrate sensor technology directly and use them to acquire new data. Given the available resources and the number of technical challenges that have already been overcome, it would seem a natural progression to use mobile communication technology for field-based environmental monitoring. In this work, we review existing technology for acquiring, processing and reporting on environmental data in the field. The objective is to demonstrate whether or not it is possible to use off-the-shelf technology for environmental monitoring. We show several levels at which this challenge is being approached, and discuss examples of technology that have been produced.
Highlights
The potential of mobile phone technology to provide rapid, cost-effective environmental monitoring has expanded greatly in recent years
We have presented below a list of examples that have been found of apps, mobile phone-related equipment and associated systems for environmental monitoring
A level of investment and redesign would be required. We emphasize that this investment is quite small in nearly every case – there are a lot of solutions available that would be very appropriate with some tweaking, and in each case most, if not all, of the technological barriers have been overcome through earlier development work
Summary
The potential of mobile phone technology to provide rapid, cost-effective environmental monitoring has expanded greatly in recent years. An important aspect of this is the fact that the millions of mobile phones currently being used around the world are the product of a mature technology that is mass-produced cheaply and reliably These systems are designed to be flexible and act as miniature computers, to enable the user to carry out a number of different activities and to allow developers to produce software, in the form of applications (apps) that can be installed and rapidly. This ready-to-use technological base, ubiquitous and purposefully designed to be extensible, provides fertile ground for environmental monitoring on a massive scale. We provide a more in-depth examination in relation to environmental sensing, focussing especially on the technological sophistication and user/device interaction level
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