It's not quite a tricorder, yet, at least not as I remember them from Star Trek. But the smartphone in my pocket is an amazing device and the "possible" is evolving and expanding at a fantastic rate. I'm convinced that the combination of GPS, sensors and recording technologies into common devices will change the way we learn about our world.
A few months ago I wrote about the accuracy of the four GPS capable devices I had access to. The results of those tests can be found here. Not surprisingly I found that my two hand-held GPS units were significantly more accurate than the smartphone I was using at that time. Especially when the GPS handhelds were given a minute to average out accuracy limiting discrepancies that are inherent in the global positioning system.
I recently upgraded my phone to a Google Nexus 5 - a top of the line Android-based smartphone. Informal tests of the GPS capabilities of this phone show it to be as good or better than my GPS handhelds. The phone consistently produces results that are accurate in the 3 to 5 meter range. That's the standard for uncorrected GPS and more accurate fixes require correction and averaging of some kind. Previous generations of smartphones did not generally apply these corrections but it appears that the newest ones do. In short, my new phone consistently out performs all the other GPS devices I've previously used including the dedicated GPS handhelds.
But it's really the full range of capabilities that the phone incorporates, and the potential for those capabilities to be integrated, that makes this so exciting and intriguing. Michael Goodchild wrote about the potential of "citizens as sensors" in 2007. He identified several roadblocks to the usefulness of citizen sensors that mostly come down to questions of reliability. For research purposes accuracy is important, but the ability to quantify the level of accuracy is essential. Smartphones can record the data you want to get as well as data that says how accurate the data should be. Several of the GPS apps for my phone show the accuracy of the fix in real time and you can watch the accuracy change in response to satellites going in and out of view.
This blog and the Hemlock Forest research project are coalescing around this idea of "citizen sensoring". It's also March 1st today so the end of this colder than average winter is in sight or, at least, that's the thought we keep in mind to retain our sanity. Spring IS coming and I need to prepare for the spring-time phase of my project field work.
Citizen Sensor resources include:
Academic Biology and its Discontents
Citizen Sensors Improve World Health
Smart Citizen Fab Lab <== open source sensor hardware
Smart Citizen KickStarter
More on open source sensor kits
Citizen Science Data Management Guide
This Post: Resources and References
Goodchild, M.F. (2007). "Citizens as sensors: the world of volunteered geography". GeoJournal 69 (4): 211–221. doi:10.1007/s10708-007-9111-y
GPS Accuracy Comparison (http://dataliterate.blogspot.com/2013/11/gps-accuracy.html)
