A Mobile phone-sensing System for emergency management: the SENSE-ME platform

Modern smartphones integrate multiple functionalitiesinto a single device: they can establish peer-to-peer wirelesslinks, they can sense the environment through several embeddedsensors, they are provided with a multi-core CPU. Hence, they canplay a crucial role on emergency scenarios, where there is needof acquiring data from the environment, processing, and quicklyconveying them to the people involved. In this paper, we describehow to turn a group of dense and heterogeneous smartphonesinto a phone-sensing platform, through the SENSE-ME software.This latter integrates three layers: (i) a network layer, that allowsthe creation of a spontaneous device-to-device communicationstructure; (ii) a sensing layer, that allows retrieving local andremote sensing data; (iii) a decision layer, that allows mining thesensed data, in order to extract context-aware information and-based on them- infer decisions about proper actions to take.In the following, we describe the SENSE-ME architecture andsome enabling technologies at each layer. Moreover, we discussthe open challenges that must be addressed for the completesystem deployment.