Gamification-based incentive mechanism for participatory sensing

Since participatory sensing relies on users´ active participation, several monetary incentive mechanisms for attracting users´ participation have been proposed. However, to make users participate in “heavy” sensing tasks (either physically or mentally), stronger incentive is required. Thus, the total amount of rewards paid by the client will quickly rise. In this paper, we propose a novel incentive mechanism based on gamification for participatory sensing to reduce the total amount of rewards paid by the client. The proposed incentive mechanism incorporates a status level scheme depending on earned reward points like airline´s mileage services, so that users with higher status can earn more reward points. We also introduce a ranking scheme among users and a badge scheme based on gamification so that users are attracted by getting not only monetary reward points but also sense of accomplishment. We formulate the problem of sensing given PoI (points of interest) with minimal reward points and devise a heuristic algorithm for deriving the set of users to which requests are sent and appropriate reward points for each request. The algorithm requires the participation probability distribution for each tuple of a user, reward points, and the burden of a sensing task. To obtain the probability distribution, we implemented a prototype of a participatory sensing system with the proposed incentive mechanism and conducted an experiment with 18 users for 30 days. As a result, we confirmed that the gamification mechanism increased participation probability from 53% (without gamification) to 73%.