Effective monitoring and management of environment pollution is key to the development of modern metropolitan cities. To sustain and to cope with the exponential growth of the cities with high industrialization, expert decision making is very essential in this process. A good governance system must be supported by an actively participating population. In participatory sensing, individuals and groups engages in the data collection actively and the helps the city governance to make proper decisions. In this paper, we propose a participatory sensing based three-tier framework to fight environment pollution in urban areas of Bangladesh. The framework includes an android application named My City, My Environment', a server for storage and computation and also a web server for the authority to monitor and maintain environmental issues through expert decision making. We have already developed a prototype system and deployed it to a small scale and demonstrated the effectiveness of this framework.
@cite_13: The recent wave of sensor-rich, Internet-enabled, smart mobile devices such as the Apple iPhone has opened the door for a novel paradigm for monitoring the urban landscape known as participatory sensing. Using this paradigm, ordinary citizens can collect multi-modal data streams from the surrounding environment using their mobile devices and share the same using existing communication infrastructure (e.g., 3G service or WiFi access points). The data contributed from multiple participants can be combined to build a spatiotemporal view of the phenomenon of interest and also to extract important community statistics. Given the ubiquity of mobile phones and the high density of people in metropolitan areas, participatory sensing can achieve an unprecedented level of coverage in both space and time for observing events of interest in urban spaces. Several exciting participatory sensing applications have emerged in recent years. For example, GPS traces uploaded by drivers and passengers can be used to generate realtime traffic statistics. Similarly, street-level audio samples collected by pedestrians can be aggregated to create a citywide noise map. In this talk, we will provide a comprehensive overview of this new and exciting paradigm and outline the major research challenges.
There are several challenges in crowd-sourcing mobile phone data in urban spaces related with incomplete samples, unknown contexts, user privacy, trustworthiness of data and conservation of energy @cite_13 . Moreover, most of these applications comes with use of sensor devices, those though low cost comes with extra added expense in terms of money and maintenance.