Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Cell phones as traffic sensors
"IntelliOne's TrafficAid technology is right at the intersection of our forecasts on sensory transformation, lightweight infrastructure, math world, and location-enhanced computing. TrafficAid, supported in part by a National Science Foundation grant, uses active cell phones as anonymous sensors to collect traffic congestion information and help route drivers around the bottlenecks. It works by measuring the location and speed of yours and countless others' cell phones whether they're in use or not. From the National Science Foundation:
"Unlike sensors and other equipment along major freeways that are expensive and take years to deploy, our system takes advantage of existing cellular networks in which wireless carriers have already invested billions of dollars," said National Science Foundation (NSF) awardee and IntelliOne CEO Ron Herman, a former engineer and computer scientist...
Because TrafficAid does not use personally identifiable data, the servers that generate position and traffic information do not know whose phone is showing up in the data stream, only that a particular phone at a given location is moving at a given speed.
From this information, IntelliOne uses its Mobile Positioning System (MPS) to convert ordinary signaling data into phone locations at a rate of two times per second, which in turn is passed to the company's Traffic Determination Engine (TDE), where each phone is matched to the correct road and monitored with other phone locations to produce average speeds and travel times for all roads with cell coverage.