CachedSensing: Exploring and documenting the environment as a treasure hunt

With a user base of billions of mobile phone subscribers worldwide, participatory sensing applications could benefit from environmental data in unprecedented quantity and quality. However, most of existing participatory sensing applications have not yet crossed the chasm. They are still in the early adoption phase and large scale deployments are missing. In order to democratize participatory sensing applications, we propose to introduce sensing tasks in a real-world treasure hunt. Using our approach called CachedSensing, users easily create sensing tasks and write them on Near Field Communication (NFC) tags. The tags are then hidden in the nature by their creators. Other users willing to explore the environment search for the tags and perform the sensing task associated to the tag found. We introduce the CachedSensing architecture and detail our prototype implementation.We finally present our deployment and share the experience gained while hiding NFC tags in the wild.