Connected Devices/Projects/SensorWeb

Project Sensor Web
Author(s)
Mozilla
Released
2016.01.18 (Initial Pitch)
2016.02.23 (Pitch Update)
Innovation Status
Gate 0 (Approved)
Website
TBD

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 great detail of understanding their living environment. We are launching a pilot project to build a crowdsourcing pm2.5 sensor network.

We picked one use case to be our pilot project and would like to invite everyone who shares the same passion to contribute, whether you are a developer, a blogger, or simply want to help. If you would like to participate, you can get in touch with our connected devices participation team immediately, or contact our development team below.

Project overview

Sensor Web is a blueprint to enable many hyper local uses cases and make sure everyone gets to access that data. 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.

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.

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.

Project status

The team received Mozilla’s support to proceed with the development of this pilot project. More details will be followed in the coming weeks. We will announce it through Mozilla’s website and mailing list as soon as it is ready. In the meantime, if you have any questions, please feel free to get in touch with the team.

References

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

Team

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