Nokia's vision of a connected mobile world

It’s not surprising that the world’s largest phone manufacturer has a grand vision as global mobile device subscriptions pass the four billion mark. Nokia’s latest white paper paints a picture of a connected global network based around the world’s most distributed and pervasive sensing instrument – the mobile phone. Thanks to an increasing number of built-in sensors - ambient light, orientation, acoustical, video, velocity, GPS - each device can capture, classify, and transmit many types of data with exceptional granularity. The perfect platform for sensing the world is already in our hands. If you only read one article today, this should be it.

This article is sourced from Nokia’s research paper entitled “Sensing the World with Mobile Devices.”

We have an insatiable desire to make sense of the world around us. How do we best observe and record the details of time, nature, location, events, and our own personal experiences? How can we understand the interactions among data and utilize them with intelligence and responsibility? To explore these questions, Nokia has spurred an explosion of sensor-based research in which the mobile phone plays a front-line role in sensing, processing, and communicating an array of valuable information.

Humans in the Loop

Until now, sensor-based networks relied primarily on the ubiquitous placement of tiny fixed nodes to report on the physical world. These automatic systems required specially designed hardware, making them expensive and ultimately inflexible. Nokia has shifted the thinking about observational systems by promoting the mobile phone as a vastly more flexible—and broadly available—sensing method.

This device-centric approach quickly leads to a people-centric vision of sensor systems. By putting mobile phones in the hands of human participants, we can take advantage of users as creators, custodians, actuators, and publishers of the data they collect.

That’s a good thing, because the physical world contains more sensory data than we can possibly comprehend. Even while moving across great distances, humans narrow down observations via critical decisions, reality checks, and inferences. Which data is important? How much do we need? How can we use the data to tell a better story? Humans make opportunistic choices on the spot, taking into consideration immediate factors not possible using digital methods.

Ecosystem for Data

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