Citizen Science Tools for Sustainable Mobility

An open Citizen Science Platform for monitoring traffic and the environment

enviroCar is a citizen science platform for sustainable mobility. Citizens, traffic planners, scientists and companies can use this infrastructure to collect and analyze vehicle information in various traffic situations and gain insight to support the development of sustainable traffic concepts. The onboard sensors provide base data while the vehicle is in motion. Individual citizens, as well as vehicle fleets, collect the sensor data and publish it as anonymized open data.

Core Architecture

The enviroCar platform comprises a number of technical components that are connected to one another via open interfaces. This facilitates the collection, analysis and visualization of the carborne data.

 

Mobile Android App

The enviroCar app is an Android application that connects to the vehicle’s onboard sensors via an ODB II adapter. It records the route driven (track) and automatically provides information about speed and revolutions per minute and calculates additional information, such as fuel consumption, estimated fuel cost and CO2 emissions.

enviroCar – maps, analysis tools and statistics

Track details and user statistics can be viewed online. Further analysis and provision of the open data to other users is possible via the enviroCar server. The data is stored in a MongoDB data base and accessible via simple RESTful Web Services. Several OGC Web Processing Services are available to carry out analytic processes for the evaluation of traffic flow. Results are visualized as interactive maps, which are then published as Web Services:

The software is hosted at GitHub.