A reusable & reconfigurable Citizen Observatory platform

The emergence of participatory sensing has led to a broad spectrum of supporting systems for environmental and behavioural monitoring, using various mobile applications and sensors attached to mobile devices. Existing research in participatory sensing focuses on systems that are only applicable to their specific application domains, and have little support for reconfigurability. In this article we present FLAMENCO, a reusable and reconfigurable platform for deploying and monitoring collaborative participatory sensing projects. FLAMENCO is designed around the notion of Citizen Observatories to coordinate community-based participatory sensing activities. The platform employs the use of flow-based visual programming to provide a graphical interface that campaign organisers can use to design reusable application components. The platform further uses reactive programming techniques for data collection and reactive processing to provide real-time monitoring and automated orchestration. We validate the expressiveness and suitability of the citizen observatory platform by successfully designing, enacting and monitoring real-world participatory sensing campaigns. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

The emergence of participatory sensing has led to a wide range of supporting systems for environmental and behavioral monitoring. FLAMENCO platform is a reusable and reconfigurable system designed for deploying and monitoring collaborative participatory sensing projects, using Citizen Observatories to coordinate community-based activities.