Particulate Matter has a serious impact on health, well-being and the life expectancy of people. Today, only few stationary or mobile sensing stations are available for the monitoring of large areas, e.g. a city. This project aims to develop mobile particulate matter dosimeters that can be used for distributed Fine Dust Monitoring, e.g. through Participatory Sensing campaigns.

The MobileDust project focuses on three different aspects of such distributed sensing, namely the instrumentation and data collection, the calibration and data processing/analytics, as well as the incentivization to participate in such systems.

In terms of instrumentation, the goal is to develop mobile PM dosimeters that can be used as an clip-on module for a mobile phone thus decreasing size and price of at least one magnitude compared to existing solutions. This task is approached in project FeinPhone. Two versions are currently under testing: a active and a passive version. The picture shows an early design study. The sensor development is being continued in the BMBF project Software Campus: FeinPhone.

More information here and from the official German Press Release, as well as in the accompanying video:

 

Matthias Budde, Andrea Schankin, Julien Hoffmann, Marcel Danz, Till Riedel, Michael Beigl (2017) Participatory Sensing or Participatory Nonsense? — Mitigating the Effect of Human Error on Data Quality in Citizen Science, Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT) 1(3), pdf, doi:10.1145/3131900

Matthias Budde, Marcel Köpke, Michael Beigl (2016) Design of a Light-scattering Particle Sensor for Citizen Science Air Quality Monitoring with Smartphones: Tradeoffs and Experiences, ProScience 3(2nd International Conference on Atmospheric Dust – DUST2016), p. 13-20, url, doi:10.14644/dust.2016.003

Matthias Budde, Rikard Öxler, Michael Beigl, Jussi Holopainen (2016) Sensified Gaming – Design Patterns and Game Design Elements for Gameful Environmental Sensing, 13th International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology (ACE2016), ACM, pdf, doi:10.1145/3001773.3001832

Matthias Budde, Michael Beigl (2016) Advances in Smartphone-based Fine Dust Sensing, II International Conference on Atmospheric Dust – DUST 2016 5, p. 23, pdf

Matthias Budde, Marcel Köpke, Michael Beigl (2015) Robust In-situ Data Reconstruction from Poisson Noise for Low-cost, Mobile, Non-expert Environmental Sensing, 19th International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC'15), pdf, doi:10.1145/2802083.2808406

Matthias Budde, Lin Zhang, Michael Beigl (2014) Distributed, low-cost particulate matter sensing: scenarios, challenges, approaches, ProScience 1(1st International Conference on Atmospheric Dust (DUST 2014)), p. 230-236, Digilabs, pdf, doi:10.14644/dust.2014.038

Matthias Budde, Rayan El Masri, Till Riedel, Michael Beigl (2013) Enabling Low-Cost Particulate Matter Measurement for Participatory Sensing Scenarios, 12th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM 2013), pdf, doi:10.1145/2541831.2541859

Matthias Budde, Pierre Barbera, Rayan El Masri, Till Riedel, Michael Beigl (2013) Retrofitting Smartphones to be Used as Particulate Matter Dosimeters, 17th International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC'13), p. 139-140, pdf, doi:10.1145/2493988.2494342