Android-powered web server for volunteer-based environment sensing

Many people today are using smartphones and similar forms of mobile computers in every aspect of their lives as a standard and undetachable personal outfit. Besides the significant amount of computing power, storage capacity, and communication capabilities, these devices are equipped with a set of embedded sensors. This makes them not only sufficient for being a reliable on-site assistants, but also powerful enough to deliver sensory information collected from the environment to the remote users through the Internet. Having an open community of smartphone users involved as data sources into the environment sensing program reduces the need for a dedicated sensory infrastructure preinstalled throughout the environment, yet providing a satisfactory level of territory coverage. The necessary prerequisite is, however, that users can contribute effortlessly, with minimum or no overhead compared to a normal smartphone usage. In this paper, we present a prototype implementation of an Android-powered web server for autonomous capture and delivery of sensory information from a mobile device to the remote users. A modular software framework is described for seamless extension of the server with support for new types of sensors as new models of devices appear on the market, while still providing basic level of interoperability with these sensors until the server gets upgraded.