A new smartphone app allows Dubliners to warn about traffic incidents, enabling traffic management centres to respond quicker to collisions and other incidents ocurring in the Irish capital. The ‘CrowdAlert’ app, which can be now downloaded for free, is one of the key components utilised in the EU-funded INSIGHT project.
CrowdAlert uses realtime data from road sensors, bus sensors and human crowd sensors to illustrate real-time road info. As explained by project coordinator Dimitrios Gunopulos (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens) in an interview with Phys.org, “we are witnessing an explosion in the quantity, quality, and variety of available information, fuelled in large part by advances in sensor networking, the availability of low-cost sensor-enabled devices and by the widespread adoption of powerful smart-phones”.
The project’s results will be of interest to public services, which have until now lacked the necessary infrastructure for handling and integrating miscellaneous data streams, including data from static and mobile sensors as well as information coming from social network sources, in real-time. Providing cities with the ability to manage emergency situations with enhanced capabilities will also open up new markets for network technologies.
Original source: Phys.org
