Connected Devices/Projects/SensorWeb

Sensor Web wants to carry on Mozilla’s mission to promote the open web when it evolves to the physical world. It aims to find the easiest path from sensors to open data so contributors can collaboratively use sensors to get a great detail of understanding of their living environment. It can be the real-time air quality of their neighboring street, the current wait time at their favorite cafe, water quality from rivers close to the village, etc. Sensor Web is a blueprint to enable many hyper local uses cases and make sure everyone gets to access that data.

Today, we all use the web to access information generated by people. Sensor Web envisions a future of web that everyone freely shares and accesses real-time sensor data for better understanding of our living environment. Contributors can find a problem they want to solve with sensors and easily publish the sensor data on the web as they do with the web pages today. When a web user searches for information online, they will be presented with the relevant real-time data published by a sensor, or insights from analyzing hundreds or thousands of sensor data.

We picked one use case to be our pilot project and would like to invite everyone who shares the same passion to contribute, weather you are a developer, a blogger, or simply want to help.

Pilot Project

We are working on a pilot project to build a crowdsourcing PM2.5 sensor network. PM2.5 is a growing problem that affects many parts of the world. Government around the world are asked to publish open data of PM2.5 index from their monitoring stations. However, government and companies can only set up so many stations. As a result, people can not obtain meaningful insights from the data. For instance, we will not be able to know when the air is bad in our neighborhood due to a nearby construction site as the government data tells us the city has a healthy number of PM2.5. We also will not know if our office has worse air quality compared to outside air or that the route and the time we choose to do our daily run is very bad for our health. We have access to numbers, but they are not meaningful as it does not link to our day to day life.

Next Step

The team received Mozilla’s support to continue with the development of this pilot project. We plan to share more information in Q2, 2016 to people who care for this problem to participate. We will announce it through Mozilla’s website and mailing list as soon as it is ready.

Stay tuned!

Reference

• Latest status update
• Innovation Board pitch deck 2016.02.18
• Innovation Board pitch deck 2016.01.11

Team

• Cindy Hsiang - Product Manager
• Eddie Lin- Engineering
• Evan Tseng- Engineering
• Mark Liang- UX Design
• Helen Huang- Visual