Mobile-Systems Distributed Operation for Sensing

[Microsoft TechFest 2008] Ramachandran Ramjee and Prashanth Mohan from Microsoft Research Lab in Bangalore, India, showed me a demo of their “Mobile Sensing Platform” (I renamed it because the title is too long!). Each sensing enabled phone can detect a honk, a bump or a brake, and the data collected from all users can provide the traffic status or the road condition (bumps and holes) to servers in real time. Note that honking in traffic is specific to some countries and this has been developed to be applied in India. If it works and if the majority of drivers use it, it could improve the accuracy of the real time traffic info.