Paper Info
Title
CommuniSense: Crowdsourcing Road Hazards in Nairobi
Abstract
Nairobi is one of the fastest growing metropolitan cities and a major business and technology powerhouse in Africa. However, Nairobi currently lacks monitoring technologies to obtain reliable data on traffic and road infrastructure conditions. In this paper, we investigate the use of mobile crowdsourcing as means to gather and document Nairobi's road quality information. We first present the key findings of a city-wide road quality survey about the perception of existing road quality conditions in Nairobi. Based on the survey's findings, we then developed a mobile crowdsourcing application, called CommuniSense, to collect road quality data. The application serves as a tool for users to locate, describe, and photograph road hazards. We tested our application through a two-week field study amongst 30 participants to document various forms of road hazards from different areas in Nairobi. To verify the authenticity of user-contributed reports from our field study, we proposed to use online crowdsourcing using Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to verify whether submitted reports indeed depict road hazards. We found 92% of user-submitted reports to match the MTurkers judgements. While our prototype was designed and tested on a specific city, our methodology is applicable to other developing cities.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1145/2785830.2785837
international conference on Human-computer interaction with mobile devices & services
Field
DocType
Volume
Computer science,Computer security,Crowdsourcing,Transport engineering,Urban computing,Metropolitan area
Journal
abs/1506.07327
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
7
0.50
15
Authors
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Darshan Santani1557.64
Jidraph Njuguna290.87
Tierra Bills390.87
Aisha Walcott-Bryant4467.69
Reginald E. Bryant5133.72
Jonathan Ledgard670.50
Daniel Gatica-Perez74182276.74