With Cellphones, Saving the Planet One Step at a Time

What is it with the way that real-time measurement affects our personal choices — particularly with regard to environmental issues? Students who have energy-usage monitors in their residence halls, for example, end up expending less energy than their counterparts without such visual aids. (A particularly colorful monitor featured a drowning polar bear.)

Now researchers at the University of Washington have come up with another monitor that they hope will play a part in saving the planet. It’s a monitor for cellphones, and it can determine whether its user is walking or running, or riding in a car, train, or bus. The program uses cellphone-tower signals to tell if the phone’s owner is riding in a vehicle, and it then presents the person with choices for modes of transit (suggesting cars or trains, for example) after the ride is over. The researchers hope the program will eventually be able to sense movement to determine the mode of transit automatically.

As the user makes “green” transit choices, leaves grow on a tree on the display. (Saving the planet just isn’t enough reward, I guess.)

“The last 30 years of personal computing has been in support of people sitting at their desks,” said James Landay, an associate professor of computer science and engineering at Washington, “but the next wave will be these little computers that are with us all the time and have an understanding of our context in the physical world.” —Scott Carlson