Mobile sensing and beyond in the information age: An experimental perspective

While fully understood, the opportunities posed to the consumer market by mobile computing platforms have been so far mainly exploited with smartphones and a few other gadgets. This is true for both the exchange of data and personal communication purposes, but also for sensing operations. Efficient sensing operations, however, may not always be performed embedding sensor hardware in smartphones or other commonly used hardware devices (e.g., portable music players, etc.). This emerges when addressing the problem of sensing physical quantities (e.g., air pollution), which can hardly be detected from a sensor mounted on a smartphone closed into a pocket. This paper considers such problem, revisiting current and past experiences with pollution sensing, tracing future directions of work. In fact, a holistic approach is required: the design of sensing systems cannot be separated from the objects embedding them, as successful sensing operation cannot be possible without accounting for those principles capable of making such sensing items not only useful and functional, but also popular and trendy.