Personalized Awareness and Safety with Mobile Phones as Sources and Sinks

Today’s mobile phones are equipped with an increasing set of sensors including GPS, accelerometers, cameras, and more that makes them ideal source nodes in urban sensing applications. The growing displays and internet connectivity also makes these phones excellent sinks of just-in-time information, including information from other sensors deployed in the infrastructure. Exploiting these features, our personalized safety and awareness system tries to enhance personal safety of users around the clock through a collection of services that process personal and aggregate community data to track, escort, flag, supervise behaviors and help users coordinate to enhance the collective safety of the group. Designed for individuals and groups that operate on campuses and beyond, it intends to make campuses safer, by going beyond the processing of individual location data and by providing services based on the application of intelligent behavior sensing algorithms and collaborative models to aggregate sensor data.