Technologists and science fiction writers have long envisioned a world where a seamless worldwide network of Internet-connected sensors could capture every event, action, and change on earth, giving us unprecedented real-time information about the state of the world. Such remote sensing and surveillance capabilities could easily have Orwellian consequences, but they can also empower citizens in new ways too.

Take the Berkeley-based “Common Sense” project, where an innovative group of researchers claims that a few simple modifications can transform an ordinary mobile phone into a powerful personal measurement instrument capable of sensing our natural environment and empowering collective action through everyday grassroots citizen science across blocks, neighborhoods, cities, and nations.

Here’s their hypothesis:

“Mobile phones are rapidly becoming the computer platform of choice in developed and developing nations. These mobile phones already shape our culture – collapsing space and time by enabling us to reach out to contact others at a distance, to perform just-in-time coordination of events, and to purchase, play, and game “on-the-go”. While there is a growing research space around sensor based activity inferencing and a wealth of existing location applications in the market, we claim that our mobile phones still fall short in their ability to enable us to measure and understand the real world around us.”

What kind of things might we like to measure, you ask? As the researchers point out, the list is potentially endless:

How hot is it? Which direction am I facing? Which direction is the wind blowing and how fast? How healthy is the air I’m breathing? What is the pollen count right now? How long can I stay outside without getting sunburned? Is the noise level safe here? Were pesticides used on these fruits? Is this water safe to drink? Are my children’s toys free of lead and other toxins? Is my new indoor carpeting emitting volatile organic compounds (VOCs)?

As it stands, our phones tell us very little about these environmental conditions. But with the addition of a few sensors and some software, we could turn our mobile phones into personal measurement devices and platforms for citizen science. Here’s a potential scenario:

“Imagine you are deciding between walking to one of two subway stations and could gather live data from the passengers waiting on the platform at each stop about the temperature and humidity of each station at that very moment? What if you were one of the 300 million people who suffer from asthma and could breath easily as you navigated your city with real-time pollen counts collected by your fellow citizens? What if you could not just be told the level of noise pollution in your city but measure and publish your own actual decibel measurements taken in front of your home? What if you were one of the more than 3 billion people, nearly half the world’s population, that burned solid fuels, including biomass fuels (wood, dung, agricultural residues) and coal, for their energy, heating, and cooking needs indoors and yet had no way to monitor the health effects of the resulting pollutants on yourself and your family even though nearly 2 million people die annually from indoor air pollution?”

In a recent trial, the Berkeley researchers collaborated with the City of San Francisco to put their air quality sensing systems on the municipal fleet of street sweepers. The street sweepers collect data as they drive around and it all gets aggregated on city maps.

For more on remote sensing and citizen science, see these other projects too:

AIR and Pigeonblog (Preemptive Media)
CarTel (MIT CSAIL)
Urban Sensing (UCLA CENS)
MetroSense (Dartmouth)
Mobile Urban Sensing (Cambridge)
SenseWeb (Microsoft Research)
Sensor Planet (Nokia)