The University of Nottingham’s Centre for Geospatial Science recently held a workshop on wearable personal sensing. First up was Evtim Peytchev of Nottingham Trent University who explained how GPS-enabled mobile phone technology is catalysing a new range of location-based services and applications. He outlined how this might be used, for example to enable road traffic data to be crowd-sourced as people move around.
There then followed a number of talks outlining different aspects of location and sensor-based work. Notable with respect to possible implications for education were Jan Feyereisl and Gobe Hobona. Jan outlined a project that was trying to develop a teaching tool for skiing. The system used in the research included a wearable sensor ski suit with video capture, various physiological sensors and location technologies. This then generates an accurate, replayable record of a ski run that can be used in teaching.
Gobe detailed his work on the JISC-funded SPACER project, which aims to enable mobile phones with built-in positioning technologies to query catalogue services conforming to Open Geospatial Consortium(OGC) standards to researchers during fieldtrips.
The implications and possible uses of GPS on mobile phones is only just beginning to be explored. If you would like to learn more about the educational implications of all this, then have a look at our 2005 TechWatch report Future Location-based Experiences and of course there is our forthcoming report on the geo-web and geo-spatial data mash-ups.
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