Cell Phones Track Personal Environmental Impact, Thanks to UCLA

UCLA researchers announced the debut of a new tool this week to help people better understand their impact on the environment. The Personal Environmental Impact Report (PEIR) (http://peir.cens.ucla.edu/) allows users to see online how their daily choices affect the environment and how the environment affects them, by providing personalized, daily estimates of measures like particulate matter exposure on roadways and carbon emissions due to driving.

 

Developed by the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS) at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, the PEIR was created in collaboration with the Nokia (News - Alert) Research Center in Palo Alto.

 

PEIR estimates impact and exposure using the travel patterns of its users as uploaded from their GPS-equipped mobile phones.

 

Accepted scientific models, like the California Air Resources Board’s (News - Alert) Emissions FACtors (EMFAC) vehicle emissions and Southern California Association of Governments traffic models, are used to calculate estimates specific to the user’s travel.

 

Using the PEIR site, users can compare values for different trips and see how lifestyle choices affect their impact and exposure. They can also compare their averages with other PEIR participants in their Facebook (News - Alert) social network.

 

By employing only the increasingly common location sensing capabilities of modern phones, CENS wants PEIR and projects like it to work on the devices that people already use. The project is part of the CENS urban and participatory sensing research program, which aims to make mobile phones act as sensors and collect data for their owners.

 

Applications for participatory sensing range from community “case-making” to systems like PEIR, which endorse personal engagement and reflection.

 

The PEIR site is currently taking inquiries from people who would like to join its beta testing in late summer. Recently released by CENS, is an explanatory video on the participatory sensing concept, available at: http://youtube.com/user/CENSVideo.

 

As a major research enterprise, The Center for Embedded Networked Sensing creates wireless sensing systems and applies them to critical scientific and societal applications. Expanding on the concept of the Internet, these distributed systems, made up of stationary and robotic smart sensors, reveal otherwise unobservable phenomena and provide new insights into the physical world.

 

With major funding from the National Science Foundation’s Science and Technology Center program, CENS is located in the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science and is made up of researchers from UCLA, UC Riverside, UC Merced, USC and the California Institute of Technology.

 

Established in 1945, The UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, offers 28 academic and professional degree programs, including an interdepartmental graduate degree program in biomedical engineering.