The Car as an Ambient Sensing Platform [Point of View]

Abstract

In recent years, cars have evolved from purely mechanical to veritable cyberphysical systems that generate large amounts of real-time data. These data are instrumental to the proper working of the vehicle itself, but make them amenable to a multitude of other uses. For instance, GPS information has recently been used for a large number of mobility studies in the academic community <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">[1]</xref> , <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref5" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">[5]</xref> , as well as to feed traffic apps such as Google Traffic and Waze. This use of vehicle data is already having a profound impact in science, industry, economy, and society at large. Now, imagine that instead of accessing one single source of vehicle-generated data (GPS), one can access the entire wealth of data exchanged on the controller area network (CAN) bus in near real timeamounting to over 4000 signals sampled at high frequency, corresponding to a few gigabytes of data per hour. What would be the implications, opportunities, and challenges sparked by this transition?