MyDrivingDroid

The Project

Mobility is a major aspect of modern life, as one of the greatest contributors to the personal carbon footprint and to the pollution and noise in urban areas. Still, not enough information is available to quantize these factors in personal (e.g. impact of each trip) or urban scale (e.g. periods of highest pollution levels), or to relate them to geographic locations (e.g. areas most exposed to CO2 emissions). The goal of the MyDrivingDroid project is to provide trip information, such as travel duration, the overall energy costs and carbon emissions, the areas of excessive traffic, among others. It is intended that users share this information using this platform in a collaborative environment. The application logs the mobile device’s embedded sensor data, and uses an external device known as an On-Board Diagnostics device, to gather vehicle data. The data is then used to develop a model that estimates the instantaneous fuel consumption, and consequently CO2 emissions, from the mobile device GPS data alone. The availability of this data will empower users to track more closely their emission record, hence make more conscious decisions about their personal mobility. Moreover, aggregating the data from multiple users into an urban scale perspective can provide finer grained indicators to urban planning.