mWASH: Mobile Phone Applications for the Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene Sector

This report assesses how water and sanitation practitioners have begun to tap the potential of mobile phones as tools to improve water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) services. Coined "mWASH" solutions, this report analyzes how mobile technology applications are already being tapped in many areas, such as health, agriculture, and disaster relief, as well as WASH. The ten case studies call out lessons critical for developing robust mWASH applications. Using SMS, email, or the web, citizens and residents can remotely report conditions such as poor water quality and sewage backflow, register lack of infrastructure to aid in network expansion, and view information on the status of service provision and problem resolution

Plan on the move : mobile participation in urban planning state-of-the-art and future potential

Citizen participation in urban planning has been a topic of academic and practical interest since the 1960s. The adoption of information and communication technologies for civic participation, electronic participation, impacts how citizens and urban planners interact. Within the field of electronic participation, mobile participation is a rather recent chapter. The proliferation of mobile technologies enables both novel forms of participation and the embeddedness of these technologies into existing practices of participation. This dissertation contains five studies exploring how emerging practices of mobile participation are changing citizen participation in urban planning. Each of the five studies describes a facet of mobile participation, beginning with an overview of participatory planning apps in use; exploring next how citizens develop apps themselves; turning then to the theoretical basis of mobile participation grounded in previous theories of participation and the digital divide; covering further the actual usage of the Täsä urban planning app; and finally, discussing self-organized community planning using mobile technologies. The results provide an overview of the specific features enhancing democratic urban planning, asses who develops mobile apps and with what intentions, and contrasts the circumstances conducive to inclusiveness in mobile participation. Mobile phones are ubiquitous and possess a combination of unique affordances such as situated engagement and participatory sensing, enabling rich, real-time data collection and experimentation. These features resonate with early adopters who, in order to affect change, need to be embedded in the institutional civic participation setting. For citizens, mobile technologies have diversified the roles of participation, so that citizens can choose between being informed, contributing ideas, or developing applications. Finally, the apps developed with open data are the result of negotiations between developers’ agency and open data availability. Overall, this dissertation suggests that mobile participation is socially constructed in as far as the features and practices implemented are subject to a host of stakeholder interests. To this end, mobile participation is conceptualized as maximum allowed deviation: it affords new practices that reshape citizen participation while being part of established forms of civic participation.Kansalaisten osallistuminen kaupunkisuunnitteluun on kiinnostanut sekä tiedeyhteisöä että suunnittelijoita jo 1960-luvulta lähtien. Informaatio- ja kommunikaatioteknologian omaksuminen sekä sähköinen osallistuminen ovat vaikuttaneet siihen, miten kaupunkilaiset ja suunnittelijat ovat vuorovaikutuksessa toisiinsa. Mobiiliosallistuminen on uusi sähköisen osallistumisen ilmiö. Mobiililaitteiden nopea leviäminen sekä mahdollistaa uusia osallistumismuotoja että sulautuu jo olemassa oleviin käytäntöihin niitä muuntaen. Tämä väitöskirja koostuu viidestä artikkelista, joissa tutkitaan miten mobiiliosallistuminen muuttaa kansalaisten osallistumista kaupunkisuunniteluun. Osatutkimukset tarkastelevat mobiiliosallistumista eri näkökulmista. Ensimmäiseksi on kartoitettu millaisia kaupunkisuunnitteluun ja kaupunkien hallintaan osallistavia sovelluksia maailmassa oli käytössä vuoteen 2015 mennessä. Toiseksi on tutkittu, miten kansalaiset osallistuvat itse sovelluksien kehittämiseen avoimen datan kilpailuissa. Kolmanneksi on tutkittu edellytyksiä mobiiliosallistumiselle, perustaen tarkastelu sosiaalisiin ja poliittisiin osallistumisteorioihin sekä digitaalisen kuilun ylittämistä koskeviin tutkimuksiin. Neljännessä osatutkimuksessa esitellään Turussa 2015 toteutetun mobiiliosallistumisen kokeilun (Täsä) tuloksia ja viidennessä käsitellään mobiiliteknologian käyttöä kaupunkilaisten itse-organisoituvassa osallistumisessa. Tulokset kertovat miten teknologiset ominaisuudet muuttavat osallistuvaa kaupunkisuunnittelua, mikä ja mitkä tahot vaikuttavat sovellusten kehittämiseen avoimella datalla, ja millä ehdoilla mobiililaitteiden avulla voidaan saavuttaa laaja osallistuminen. Mobiililaitteet ovat jo nyt ihmisten mukana kaikkialla. Niiden ominaisuudet mahdollistavat osallistumisen paikan päällä (situated engagement) ja osallistumisen sensoridatan keräämiseen (participatory sensing) ja siten uusiin ja aiempaa monipuolisempiin käyttäjä- ja paikkalähtöisiin analyyseihin. Tämä ominaisuudet ovat olleet houkuttelevia aikaisille omaksujille. Institutionaalista tukea kuitenkin tarvitaan, että uuden teknologian mahdollisuudet voidaan tehdä tutuksi laajalle yleisölle. Mobiiliosallistuminen on myös monipuolistanut osallistumisrooleja: sen avulla kansalaiset voivat aiempaan helpommin valita mitä informaatiota saavat, esittää omia ideoitaan ja kehittää omia sovelluksia.Avoimen datan kilpailuissa kehitetyt sovellukset ovat kompromissi kehittäjien tavoitteiden ja käytössä olevan datan välillä. Kokonaisuudessaan väitöskirja esittää, että mobiiliosallistuminen on sosiaalisesti rakentunutta, siinä määrin kuin sen ominaisuudet ja käytännöt määrittyvät eri tahojen intressien yhteensovittamisessa. Tämän vuoksi mobiiliosallistuminen käsitteellistyy ”suurimmaks sallituksi poikkeamaksi”: se mahdollistaa uusia käytäntöjä jotka muokkaavat kansalaisten osallistumista samalla kun ne ovat jo osa vakiintunutta kansalaisten osallistumista

Hardware for recognition of human activities: a review of smart home and AAL related technologies

Activity recognition (AR) from an applied perspective of ambient assisted living (AAL) and smart homes (SH) has become a subject of great interest. Promising a better quality of life, AR applied in contexts such as health, security, and energy consumption can lead to solutions capable of reaching even the people most in need. This study was strongly motivated because levels of development, deployment, and technology of AR solutions transferred to society and industry are based on software development, but also depend on the hardware devices used. The current paper identifies contributions to hardware uses for activity recognition through a scientific literature review in the Web of Science (WoS) database. This work found four dominant groups of technologies used for AR in SH and AAL—smartphones, wearables, video, and electronic components—and two emerging technologies: Wi-Fi and assistive robots. Many of these technologies overlap across many research works. Through bibliometric networks analysis, the present review identified some gaps and new potential combinations of technologies for advances in this emerging worldwide field and their uses. The review also relates the use of these six technologies in health conditions, health care, emotion recognition, occupancy, mobility, posture recognition, localization, fall detection, and generic activity recognition applications. The above can serve as a road map that allows readers to execute approachable projects and deploy applications in different socioeconomic contexts, and the possibility to establish networks with the community involved in this topic. This analysis shows that the research field in activity recognition accepts that specific goals cannot be achieved using one single hardware technology, but can be using joint solutions, this paper shows how such technology works in this regard

Noise mapping based on participative measurements

The high temporal and spatial granularities recommended by the European regulation for the purpose of environmental noise mapping leads to consider new alternatives to simulations for reaching such information. While more and more European cities deploy urban environmental observatories, the ceaseless rising number of citizens equipped with both a geographical positioning system and environmental sensors through their smartphones legitimates the design of outsourced systems that promote citizen participatory sensing. In this context, the OnoM@p system aims at offering a framework for capitalizing on crowd noise data recorded by inexperienced individuals by means of an especially designed mobile phone application. The system fully rests upon open source tools and interoperability standards defined by the Open Geospatial Consortium. Moreover, the implementation of the Spatial Data Infrastructure principle enables to break up as services the various business modules for acquiring, analysing and mapping sound levels. The proposed architecture rests on outsourced processes able to filter outlier sensors and untrustworthy data, to cross- reference geolocalised noise measurements with both geographical and statistical data in order to provide higher level indicators, and to map the collected and processed data based on web services