Crowd-sensing is an approach involving a large, spread out group of participants using mobile devices with the aim of receiving reliable data from the field. This approach has been used both in industry and multiple research studies, including traffic and road monitoring (geo-crowdsourcing), urban mobility, smart cities, social networking, healthcare, safety, environmental and ecological monitoring, and others.
The rapid emergence of mobile devices, such as smartphones and wearables, usually with a rich array of sensors, enables a new means of acquiring sensor data, known as crowd-sensing. Together with the intrinsic mobility of their users, the ability to acquire local knowledge from people’s immediate environment or even themselves is gained. Crowd-sensing is useful, not only to industry but also different research communities that have an interest in collecting a new class of data over a much larger scope of area and people than was previously possible. It is also an attractive approach for companies looking to collect data without high investment costs.
