Smart Assistants for Smart Mobility – Environmental Motion Assistant (E.M.A.)

Smart Assistants for Smart Mobility – Environmental Motion Assistant (E.M.A.)

The Smart Mobility concept was developed from increased traffic with its related side effects, including pollution, fatalities, and wasted time. The concept of Smart Assistant is related to a mobile device and software agent that can perform tasks, or services, on behalf of an individual, based on a combination of user input, location awareness, and the ability to access information from a variety of online sources. Smart Assistants used for Smart Mobility refers to devices used for monitoring specific conditions of the air inside vehicles, in order to determine, store and analyze, over multiple driving periods, different environmental contexts.

The Environmental Motion Assistant (E.M.A.) is developed as a service that would help any potential user to have a clear understanding of what’s happening inside and outside of their cars, from the perspective of what should be a clean and healthy air environment. Through E.M.A., as a Smart Mobility Service, it is possible to continuously measure and store the internal/external air condition metrics (CO2, Alcohol Concentration, Temperature, Humidity, Air Quality, Speed, Dust etc.), for any vehicle, private or public, offering the possibility for the passengers to see the conditions around them. Also, through E.M.A., if the system is installed inside a public vehicle, the authorities will be able to track and analyse both current and historical conditions in the car, and to obtain useful insights by integrating vehicle internal data with outside environmental data, that could come from the same type of device as for the vehicles, but modified for outdoor conditions. Moreover, E.M.A. targets to offer to the users, the comfort of knowing, almost in real-time or historically, the position of the interest vehicles, together with internal conditions. Therefore, for the associated cars, the user will be able to see the data, for any moment he used the system together with visual analytics based on it.  

E.M.A. provides two modes that the user can access it: public and personal modes. The user is able to login by using personal credentials, in which case he will have access to both public and personal mode, but he will be also able to continue without any credentials and for this case, he will have access only to public mode.  As a brief explanation, public mode means accessing data coming from public vehicles (like buses) while personal mode means that the user has also some personal vehicles that he wants to monitor. From the mobile application perspective, while in public mode, the user’s first view will be centered on his position and at the same time he will be able to see all mapped stations and vehicles around him.

The personal mode refers to a scenario where a user has different monitored personal vehicles. If choosing the personal mode, he will be taken to the default view, where he can see the last know the position of each of his associated cars. By clicking any car, he will access the car view where it is possible to follow the car while displaying internal conditions and also continuously updating the car position. Several warnings/alerts could be activated to raise alarms/notifications if some problematic situations appear. User should also be able to access the analytics view where he can see worst situations from the inside air perspective.

Currently, E.M.A. is developed in web-based mode design from the backend (specific module), front-end (data visualization) and the smart mobility model service. The picture below represents a screenshot from the E.M.A. web-based interface solution. This is available in the personal mode, using an authentication service, and a public mode. The personal model will rely on a couple of modules as the “My devices” section, that will be able to record the devices of authentication, the “History” section showing the recording “Devices”, the “Start/End Date” of the sensors prototype data monitoring, and the “Run” module, in which the application will provide information related to prototype functionality. The section related to “Analytics” will provide information related to the data visualization vs. time and different parameters monitored. Also, the “Admin” section will allow users to customize their own profile.

Authors: Carmen Catalina RUSU, Dragos Sebastian CRISTEA

Company: ALTFACTOR