Your Smartphone as the Ultimate Road Sensor

REDMOND, Wash. -- Most of us carry our phones everywhere we go. Yet we spend only a small percent of time actually using all the computing, communication and sensing capabilities being crammed into them these days. Ramachandran Ramjee and his team of Microsoft researchers wanted to change this so they devised a new distributed software platform that uses things like GPS, the accelerometer, Bluetooth and microphone sensors on your phone to create a rich collection of road data for personalized trips.
After downloading an app to your phone, you can access a specialized map that aggregates information about potholes, speed bumps, honking cars, etc. "Say you want to travel somewhere and you notice there's a lot of beeping and honking going on in one particular part of town. You may decide you want to avoid that area," Ramjee says.
Using a remote controlled Audi R8 and two smartphones, Ramjee placed a cardboard "speed bump" in the path of the car to show how his phone automatically registered the bump and sent information about its position back to a mobile node for aggregation. In theory, by using the data generated from thousand of smartphones, you could get an hyper accurate picture road conditions in your town or city.
"There may be times when you don't necessarily want the shortest route to a given destination," Ramjee says. Sometimes, you'll want the safest."