Wide Angle: All the Cool Kids Have Them

March 27, 2009

What if you had a little companion that could unobtrusively figure out what kind of transportation you were taking and tell you the environmental effect? Several high school students recently turned to their new phones to find out.

Starting in February, 25 students at the Urban School of San Francisco participated in a pilot project organized by the Go Green Foundation. The foundation worked with Nokia, AT&T, and UCLA to hook the kids up with special GPS-enabled cell phones that tracked their carbon emissions. Just knowing the cumulative effect of actual trips caused the students to rethink car rides to school.

After hearing about it on NPR, I asked Jeff Burke, a researcher at UCLA's Center for Embedded Networked Sensing, how this works. Burke's group created a "personal environmental impact report" or PEIR application. The phone's GPS sends data to a server every 30 seconds and a special algorithm cleverly detects the mode of transport based on location, speed, and other factors. Carbon emissions are calculated using the California Air Resources Board's model. The application can also figure out how much particulate matter you generated and much you were exposed to (*cough*).

Finally, the application generates a Web-based report showing a map, details about your trips, and trends over time. "The idea here is looking at habits in a continual fashion," Burke says. "You have an opportunity to see changes and make decisions." The app can run on phones with the Symbian operating system and Windows Mobile, and Burke expects they'll have an Android client shortly.

Go Green Foundation's Martín Gutierrez says the Urban School students are planning to compete against other school groups equipped with the phones. Get ready for a green team bracket.

Photo: The Go Green Foundation Nokia phone with AT&T service, courtesy Martín Gutierrez.

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