Gotcha: a mobile urban sensing system

Abstract

Urban environment has significant impacts on the health of city dwellers. To understand these impacts, city planners have to obtain fine-grained environmental information, however such information is not available with traditional environmental systems. To address this problem, we present Gotcha, a taxi-based mobile sensing system for fine-grained environmental data acquisition. Gotcha utilizes taxi cabs to serve as a sensor that collects a variety of environmental information (such as concentrations of carbon-dioxide, carbon-monoxide, ozone, particulate matter, etc.). We aim to deploy our system in the city of Shenzhen on a fleet of 100 taxi cabs, and we present here our results from our initial deployment.