UCLA researchers unveiled a new tool this week to help people
understand their relationship with the environment. The Personal
Environmental Impact Report (PEIR) (http://peir.cens.ucla.edu/)
lets users see online how their daily choices affect the environment
and how the environment affects them, by providing personalized, daily
estimates of measures like particulate matter exposure on roadways and
carbon emissions due to driving. PEIR was developed by the Center for
Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS) at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of
Engineering and Applied Science in collaboration with the Nokia
Research Center, Palo Alto.
PEIR estimates impact and
exposure using the actual travel patterns of its users, as uploaded
from their GPS-equipped mobile phones. Accepted scientific models, like
the California Air Resources Board's
Emissions FACtors (EMFAC) vehicle emissions and Southern California
Association of Governments traffic models, are used to calculate
estimates specific to the user's travel. On
the PEIR site, users can compare values for different trips and see how
lifestyle changes affect their impact and exposure. They can also
compare their averages with other PEIR participants in their Facebook
social network.
By employing only the increasingly common
location sensing capabilities of modern phones, CENS wants PEIR and
projects like it to work on the devices that people already own and
use. The project is part of the CENS urban and participatory sensing
research program, which aims to make everyday mobile phones act as
sensors and collect data for their owners. Applications for
participatory sensing range from community "case-making" to systems like PEIR, which promote personal engagement and reflection.
The PEIR site is currently accepting inquiries from people who would
like to join its beta testing in late summer. CENS recently released an
explanatory video on the participatory sensing concept, available at: http://youtube.com/user/CENSVideo.