People-Centric Mobile Crowdsensing Platform for Urban Design

With the inevitability of urbanization, it is of critical importance to understand how effective the urban spaces are planned and designed to build comfortable and lively smart cities. Our approach is to develop a people-centric mobile crowdsensing platform to provide insights for urban designers, by leveraging on the proliferation of mobile phones and recent advancements in mobile sensing and data analytics technologies. More specifically, we have designed and developed a smartphone based platform to collect both user-generated data and data from multiple sensors contributed by various demographic groups, especially the aged, to understand how they perceive and utilize public spaces. The data collection is also conducted in a privacy-aware manner. Based on the collected data, we then develop advanced and dedicated analytics tools to derive insights about users' opinions towards public spaces in their neighborhood, utilization of public spaces and mobility patterns of the different demographic groups, etc. These insights will be utilized to enhance urban design of future smart towns.