A New Urban Sensing and Monitoring Approach: Tagging the City with the RADAR SENSING App

摘要

Focal point of this conference is to examine urban patterns and city structures regarding the changing needs of people in their everyday life. In order to do so, involved stakeholders such as planners and decision makers need to have precise information about citizens' needs and feelings concerning actual difficulties or tasks. Thus, approaches are needed to identify such topics, and to evaluate urban processes. One potential for this can be seen in new developments like Ubiquitous Computing and pervasive sensing with mobile devices which can act as small and connected sensors in the spatial environment. Due to the increasing prevalence of such mobile devices, more and more geospatial data is being produced, and some of it allows for inferring information about people's behaviour in specific areas. The main problems in these tasks are on one side that the processing of such data is a difficult task, due to the heterogeneity of interfaces and used data formats, but also because of the absence of a target-oriented question and the overlook of the potential for spatial and urban planning. We consider mobile crowdsourcing approaches to gather data in combination with the potentials of ubiquitous computing via new generation smartphones with the RADAR SENSING app as a promising approach. This app is a target-oriented software application that allows non-experts and citizens of a city to easily provide location based data just by using their mobile device and to attach urban spaces with specific planning relevant information. The presented test study was conducted in Kaiserslautern and aimed at validating methods to process and analyse localised tags in an urban area with the RADAR infrastructure. Hence, this study is an elaboration of the potential of new sensing and monitoring methods for urban areas.