This master’s thesis will present the EnviSensor project, a mobile application paired with a low-cost Bluetooth sensor module to be utilized in the collection of environmental factors via a participatory sensor network. The EnviSensor project seeks to further research in the area of environmental data collection within a participatory sensor network as well as demonstrating the viability of wid...

Participatory sensing is an emerging paradigm in which citizens everywhere voluntarily use their computational devices to capture and share sensed data from their surrounding environments in order to monitor and analyze some phenomenon (e.g., weather, road traffic, pollution, etc.). Interest in participatory sensing systems has risen since a large mobile sensor network can now be opportunistica...

Because participatory sensing – targeted campaigns where people harness mobile phones as tools for data collection – involves large and distributed groups of people, participatory sensing systems benefit from tools to measure and evaluate the contributions of individual participants. This paper develops a set of metrics to help participatory sensing organizers determine individual participants’...

Participatory Sensing is a process whereby individuals and communities use mobile phones and web services to observe, analyze, and present personal and environmental artifacts, events and experiences. In this technical report we describe a community data campaign that made use of smartphone based participatory sensing for environmental needs assessment. Community organizers defined the content ...

This article is part of the series on African primary care research and focuses on participatory action research. The article gives an overview of the emancipatory-critical research paradigm, the key characteristics and different types of participatory action research. Following this it describes in detail the methodological issues involved in professional participatory action research and runn...

Participatory Sensing is a new computing paradigm that aims to turn personal mobile devices into advanced mobile sensing networks. In this paper, we describe and evaluate two distributed strategies for processing participatory sensing data. These strategies are built on top of a decentralized architecture composed on user-contributed machines. The evaluation shows that these strategies spread t...

Multi-site evaluations are becoming increasingly common in federal funding portfolios. Although much thought has been given to multi-site evaluation, there has been little emphasis on how it might interact with participatory evaluation. Therefore, this paper reviews several National Science Foundation educational, multi-site evaluations for the purpose of examining the extent to which these eva...

Participatory Sensing is an emerging application paradigm that leverages the growing ubiquity of sensor-capable smartphones to allow communities to carry out wide-area sensing tasks, as a side-effect of people’s everyday lives and movements. This paper proposes a decentralized infrastructure for supporting Participatory Sensing applications. It describes an architecture for modeling, prototypin...

BACKGROUND Epidemiology has contributed in many ways to identifying various risk factors for disease and to promoting population health. However, there is a continuing debate about the ability of epidemiology not only to describe, but also to provide results which can be better translated into public health practice. It has been proposed that participatory research approaches be applied to epid...