Personal Environmental Impact Report

Project

Environmental Protection magazine reports on the Personal Environmental Impact Report (PEIR), developed at UCLA’s Center for Embedded Networked Sensing with the Nokia Research Center in Palo Alto. Using GPS data uploaded from users’ phones, it applies emissions and traffic models to estimate the carbon emissions and particulate exposure linked to daily travel, and lets people compare trips and see the effect of changing their habits. It forms part of research into ‘participatory sensing’, which aims to turn everyday phones into data-gathering sensors. Beta testing was planned for late summer 2008.