We were asked by a colleague in Environmental Science about using a mobile phone to relay pictures back of one of there remote sites every half hour for hopefully about a month. We have created not only bespoke mobile application that allows any suitable mobile camera phone to be used for functionality but is programmable for a variety of operating parameters time of operation, frequency etc. The resultant images can be viewed as a series of time lapse photographs at the project site

Mobile sensor cam project in ealy test phase using additional solar panel

River Flow Monitoring

River flow monitoring system

Our influence on the changing natural environment poses many challenges for future generations. One obvious environmental change relates to the increasing regularity of flooding. Monitoring river and stream velocity enables the accurate modelling of flood planes, river bank erosion, and mans influence over the natural environment. The remote monitoring unit developed for this project gives the environmental science community a ‘real time’ cost effective data collection system, freeing up large amounts of time spent out in the field gathering data and eliminating the potential for human error during the recording process. The system incorporates a sensor placed in the river that users Doppler shift to esimate the flow rate of the river. A unit on the bank relays the sensor reading plus a GPS time stamp to a central server using a GPRS connection to the celluar network. With cellular coverage now extended to even the most remote rural of areas systems this project highlights that mass monitoring of stream and river networks is now a practical solution.

Bus ETA

Application showing ETA of bus at selected stop

Whilst it is readily accepted that mobile phones enable users to obtain information quickly and easily in any location, there are a great many ways in which this information can be accessed and provided. Although mobile phone manufacturers are embracing standardization of mobile phone operating systems, as yet there is no clear market leader, which coupled with extremely variable phone feature sets, make porting applications to different platforms a challenging experience. Further to this, is the fact that even within technologically advanced societies large sections of the population are technologically naïve. Thus, the development of information systems that can be accessed by large numbers of the general public from mobile phones, can be problematic, and all too often such systems provide only a single mode access solution, which limits both their acceptance and usefulness. In this project we developed a mobile information system which has been designed so that it can accommodate both the variation in mobile phone features and the technical sophistication of individual users and can be easily deployed for a wide variety of services. The system was demonstrated through an example service which demonstrated information related to the Estimated Time of Arrival (ETA) of vehicles in a metro-bus public transport system. The solution illustrates that information can be provided in different forms, to suit individual users preferences, from the same mobile information system, without significant increases in the underlying infrastructure.