Environmental Tomography: Ubiquitous Sensing with Mobile Devices

The ubiquitous nature of mobile phones, which are location-aware devices, presents a unique platform for large-scale computing applications. In particular, if mobile phones are coupled with sensors, they can be used for detection and monitoring of environmental phenomena such as pollution and radiation. In this demonstration, we present environmental tomography, a system for ubiquitous environmental sensing with mobile devices. Aggregate sensor measurements are collected by the devices along fixed paths such as roads, and these aggregates are used to reconstruct an estimate of the distribution of the underlying physical phenomenon. Our system is robust to the dynamic characteristics of mobile networks and also preserves the privacy of mobile user locations. We demonstrate a prototype that generates estimate distributions from user specified data collection paths and underlying data distributions. The accuracy of the reconstructed distributions is illustrated both numerically and graphically.