Mobile crowd-sensing in the Smart City

The Smart City connects citizens in novel ways by leveraging the latest advances in information and communication technologies (ICT). Smart citizens have various ICT solutions at their disposal, which allow them to optimize their day-to-day activities in the urban environment they live and/or work. The integration of rich sensing capabilities (e.g. camera, microphone, GPS, accelerometer, barometer) in today’s mobile devices allows their users to sense their urban environment in often unforeseen ways. In mobile crowd-sensing the citizens of the Smart City collect, share and jointly use services based on the sensed data, e.g. the Waze application for optimized car-based navigation, the Smart Citizen project for collecting meteorological measurements. This paper presents the current state-of-the-art and future challenges in mobile crowd-sensing in urban environments, by focusing on sensing in the following focus areas: environment, citizen collaboration, urban traffic systems, health/fitness and social networking. From each of these areas a set of representative applications (e.g. Waze, Foursquare, Ushahidi) were selected, analyzed and compared based on the following criteria: expected social and economic impact, novelty and sophistication of system architecture, sensing methods applied, motivation techniques and user privacy.