People like cheap motion sensors

Nokia, in collaboration with the California Department of Transportation and the Department of Construction and Environmental Engineering at the University of Berkeley, conducted an interesting experiment on Friday. Students volunteers equipped with phones with integrated GPS-navigator drove their cars over a 16-kilometer stretch of one of the Californian highways. We drove for the purpose of demonstration testing of a new intellectual software system created in the Nokia Development Center in Palo Alto and designed to predict the traffic situation using special algorithms based on the study of driver behavior patterns.



Each phone as it moves its owner constantly sends the parameters of the movement of the car to the server. Having accumulated enough such data and comparing it with signals from cars on adjacent roads, the system will be able to predict the occurrence of traffic jams and recommend the user to refrain from the perilous route.



The desire of the creators of the system to use drivers' personal cell phones as sensors is due to the fact that this will make it cheaper compared to systems based on fixed sensors installed along the road.

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via CNET