An Implicit and User-Modifiable Urban Sensing Environment

Capturing useful data in a complex and dense urban space is an inherently challenging task. There is so much data people can capture in a city, yet they may fail to capture important information, some of which they don’t even know that it exists. In this paper, we discuss an implicit approach to urban sensing and introduce an implicit sensing system that combines wearable sensors and mobile phone networks to support early-stage exploration of urban issues. An important technical issue that arose in the development of such sensing system is localization in indoor and urban canyon environments. We discuss the use of RFID tags as easy-to-deploy location reference points that could be installed, modified and reused by end-users. The evolution of user-modifiable location infrastructure should reflect and support implicit as well as explicit sensing that takes place in a city.