Abstract:
Citizens can act as sensors in crises management and volunteers for Geographic information and
their surroundings. The proliferation of mobile phone in the developing countries sets a stage for the
users to become participants in sensing their environment. A feat that was previously a preserve of
specialized and hard coded sensors. Today’s mobile phone is equipped with numerous sensors
ranging from the camera, the gyroscope, GPS, thermometer, barometer, accelerometer and the
microphone. Whenever participants are engaged to crowd source data, they start with zeal but later
drop out before sufficient data is gathered for accurate analysis. This project carries the objective of
designing and developing an enhanced participatory sensing (PS) tool that will expand usability and
entrench subtle incentive mechanism through porting intelligent agents. Experimental research
design was used to ensure collaboration with volunteering participants of the tool in its development.
The resulting tool is used to crowd source data form volunteering participants, which is analyzed and
compared with data from non-enhanced tool. Data from the enhanced PS tool has accuracy levels of
86.6% as compared to 50% from non-enhanced tool under the SMART framework. However, very
consistent participants even with the non-enhanced tool, showed an 85% data accuracy levels. This
indicated the leveraging power of mediation of intelligent agents in PS tools.
