PSAFactory: An End-User Programming Tool for Building Participatory Sensing Applications

Abstract

Participatory Sensing is a new paradigm that empowers non-professional citizens to collect and share sensory data from their surrounding environments using their mobile phones. The emergence of the participatory sensing has resulted in a broad range of novel participatory sensing applications (PSA). PSA are more suitable to be developed by the people who want to launch the campaign, rather than the professional software developer. However, the development of PSA requires complex programming skill, and thus only professionals can build them. Inspired by the concept of end-user programming, this paper develops a tool, named PSAFactory, for non-professional people who do not understand the programming techniques to develop their own PSA in a quick and simple way. With this tool, non-professionals can build PSA by just doing some simple settings, while the tool will run automatically to tackle common issues in a completely transparent manner. Besides, two prototype applications are developed with the tool.