Smartphones used to gather data about San Jose's urban streams
Brandon Bailey
San Jose Mercury News
10/18/2010
Local environmental officials are hoping an army of volunteer creek watchers will start downloading a new smartphone program sometime in the next few weeks that will help them track water levels, trash and other conditions along San Jose's urban streams.
"It gets a lot more eyes out into the watershed," said James Downing, an environmental services specialist for the city, who recently tested the new Creek Watch application developed by researchers at IBM's Almaden Lab.
IBM computer scientists created the app as a project to study how mobile phones can be used to gather and share information -- a growing field of interest for many corporate and academic researchers. In a reverse of the current craze for "location-based" programs, which deliver personalized information to users' phones based on their whereabouts, the idea is that smartphones can be valuable tools for collecting isolated bits of data and assembling them into a larger picture.
Scientists and environmental activists have used similar apps to monitor the spread of spilled oil in the Gulf of Mexico, measure noise pollution in Paris and report sightings of cassowaries, large flightless birds that live in Australia.
In a slightly different approach, scientists at the Department of Homeland Security say they hope to develop an inexpensive sensor that could turn millions of phones into passive detectors of deadly chemicals, capable of sounding an alarm and notifying authorities in case of accidental leak or terrorist attack.
Most smartphones are already equipped with several sensing devices, including GPS locators, gyroscopes and digital cameras, which can be used to collect information about their physical surroundings, said Jeff Pierce, who leads the mobile computing research team at IBM's Almaden facility. Pierce and IBM computer scientist Christine Robson developed the "Creek Watch" app with input from Downing and his co-workers.
The app is a downloadable program for iPhones that lets users answer a few questions, snap a photo and submit a standardized report to a website (www.creekwatch.org) that compiles the data into tables and maps, which authorities can use to spot trends or problem areas in need of cleanup. The app uses the phone's GPS system to tie each report to a specific location.
Local officials believe the relative simplicity of the app could help attract volunteers -- such as students or members of scouting groups and service clubs -- for the otherwise daunting task of monitoring miles and miles of streams and water channels.
