WeSenseIt: Thousands of eyes on the environment

What if citizens became environmental “citizen-sensors,” walking around with their smartphones and uploading sensor readings, photographs and videos of important environmental data to a platform that aggregates their data with data from fixed sensor networks? It would both improve flood monitoring and increase citizens’ environmental awareness. The WeSenseIt project is developing the hardware and software for such a Citizen Water Observatory platform, which has already been tested at sites in England, Italy, and the Netherlands. Members from the project’s four academic partners, as well as a number of private and public partners met at EPFL this week to discuss the progress they have made so far, and the prospects for the initiative’s final 18 months.

“The principle objectives of the WeSenseIt project are involving citizens in environmental monitoring, using low-cost sensing technology, peoples smart phones, and the social media to crowd-source environmental data” explains Hendrik Huwald, coordinator of EPFL’s involvement in the four-year project. But as it evolved, it took on an additional dimension: hazard management and decision-making, in particular in response to floods. “In the Italian case study for instance, organized with the Alto Adriatico Water Authority and the Municipality of Vicenza, WeSenseIt is working hand in hand with the civil protection service to provide a platform that they can use to monitor emergency response operations from a single online dashboard,” he says.

ENAC researchers are involved in the development of two types of monitoring technologies, which they presented during the poster session on Tuesday afternoon. One of them involves asking citizens to use their smartphone cameras to film rivers to estimate flow rates. Video analysis would allow researchers to infer the speed of the water at the surface, and from there, determine how much water the river is carrying. “We are using tracking algorithms developed for the computer mouse to analyze the movement of the water surface,” explains Steven Weijs, a researcher at ENAC’s CRYOS Lab. “Ultimately, we want people to be able to film the river from any angle and still be able to get an accurate measurement of the flow rate.”

The WeSenseIt platform is also designed to automatically integrate data from a network of low-cost wireless sensors. Tristan Brauchli is involved in developing an inexpensive, yet reliable sensible heat-flux sensor as an alternative to the devices used today that cost well over 10,000 Swiss francs. The current version of the device, using a cheap thermocouple as the principal sensing element is able to detect high frequency temperature fluctuations from which the sensible heat flux can be inferred, is expected to cost less than 100 Swiss francs. This cut in cost does come with a loss in accuracy, but the hope is that, by making them more affordable, networks of such sensors will collect data with a spatial coverage that is presently unachieved.

WeSenseIt is a four-year research project funded by the European Commission’s seventh framework research program. It is coordinated by the University of Sheffield, and involves researchers from the UNESCO Institute for Water Education, Delft, the University of Middlesex, and EPFL, as well as 10 public and private partners.

For more information, go to www.wesenseit.eu