Contextual Sensitivity of the Ambient Temperature Sensor in Smartphones

Environmental monitoring using external and Smartphone-interfaced wireless sensors has been widely used in the past. The roadblocks start emerging when we use on-board sensors in off-the-shelf Smartphones to estimate context aware environmental parameters like ambient temperature, humidity and atmospheric pressure. In this work, we evaluate the sensitivity and accuracy of the on-board ambient temperature sensor under various circumstances and measure its performance against standardized weather monitoring equipment. Additionally, we identify the roles of several internal and external factors that affect the temperature data. Such an investigation is motivated by the need of pervasive temperature sensing to power Smart HVAC environments and for weather crowdsourcing. Our experiments reveal that while the on-board temperature sensors have great potential, using them for large scale data collection still requires significant work.