Towards an Application Platform that Allows Access to Sensors in the Car

Modern cars include a multitude of sensors that can monitor how people interact with the car and can acquire information about the status and surrounding of the car. In two scenarios we explain briefly why such information is valuable and how potential implicit and explicit crowdsourcing services can work with this data. We then discuss what types of information are available and how collecting and sharing them creates a new platform for interactive in-car applications. One class of information is related to users’ interaction with the car like steering the car or using the navigation application. A further class of information is multimedia data generated by in-car cameras (e.g., night vision). We implemented a platform to make it easy for developers to acquire and share such data. In the final part of the paper we discuss possible application scenarios.