Participatory Sensing for Government-Centric Applications: A Singapore Case Study

Singapore, an urbanized and populated country with high penetration of smartphones, provides an excellent base for citizen-centric participatory sensing applications. Mobile participatory sensing applications offer an efficient means of directing feedback to government agencies for timely identifying and solving problems of citizens’ concern. While real deployments of such applications are on an uprising trend in Singapore, there is no concerted effort that studies the user experience of these applications. To fill this gap, we conduct a market study by analyzing the user reviews on the Google Play and Apple App Store for six major mobile crowdsourcing applications created by Singapore government agencies. This study was carried out for a period of 4 months during which we collected and analyzed 592 customer reviews. This was also supplemented by our personal use of the applications during the same period. This paper presents the methodology and findings of this study, as well as our recommendations of what improvements that these applications could incorporate. We classify user reviews into 8 major concerns, and recommend 9 features to enhance the applications’ utility. The recommendations are presented in terms of user interface, incentive, and publicity.