As a researcher, you’re probably using your smartphone as part of your work. With Elsevier’s Hivebench lab notebook, for example, scientists can prepare, conduct and analyze experiments from their smart devices.

You may also be using your smartphone for the science itself – to monitor climate fluctuations in your lab, for example, or photographing the bacterial colonies in your Petri dish. Or, you may be among the growing number of researchers who are harnessing the power of smart phones and citizen science for your own work.

Consumers have embraced the smartphone since Apple’s memorable iPhone launch in 2007, with scientists embracing the smartphone soon after. Now the two worlds are converging, with scientists harnessing the power of citizen science with newer and smarter technologies.

For example, the smartphone can be a powerful device to collect data – especially with the various sensors that the modern smartphone carries. The most common built-in sensors are the accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer, GPS receiver, microphone and camera. Other sensors that are seen in the higher-end models are for example gravity and rotational vector sensors, and environmental sensors such as barometers, photometers, thermometers and for example air humidity sensor. Some of the newer models even have a heart rate monitor built in, or a pedometer to track your steps, and there is even a Japanese model that can detect radiation levels.

Smart applications

While obviously all are built in to serve consumer’s needs, each of these sensors can also be very well deployed for scientific purposes. Here, one can distinguish between passive and active sensing tasks. Passive sensing enable automated collection of smartphone generated data, for example by the accelerometer, GPS data and ambient noise levels. Active sensing tasks ask for an active user contribution such as taking a picture, tagging a place or sending a text message.

But the smartphone’s potential goes beyond the obvious, with new applications being discovered all the time. What about searching for ultra-high energy cosmic rays with the image sensors in your smartphone camera? The scientists suggesting this idea, in a 2016 article in Astroparticle Physics, think that if sufficient users run a dedicated application on their phone, an array composed of these smartphones could start picking up air showers generated by cosmic rays. Crayfis just launched a beta version of their app, with this demo video:

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Another example: the accelerometer in your smartphone being used to detect seismic disturbances and thereby helping to predict an upcoming earthquake and enabling people to evacuate in time. To participate, you just download the “MyShake” app and have it run in the background on your mobile device. The computers at UC Berkeley will then distinguish between real seismic disturbances and your normal movements and draw their conclusions.

An area where smartphones are being used frequently for science is in Earth observations. Here, they are used to collect data about the Earth's physical, chemical and biological systems. While “classic” remote sensing devices such as satellites and spectometers can analyze large areas in one go, the sensors in smartphones are suitable for making measurements near the ground’s surface – things that could otherwise be easily missed due to obstructions such as trees, clouds or low vegetation, or simply because they are very small. One of the most successful examples of an earth observation program is the eBird, an ornithology app, which has gathered nearly 370 million bird observations from more than 150,000 participants since 2002. Read more in this Biological Conservation article: "The eBird enterprise: An integrated approach to development and application of citizen science" (freely available until May 31, 2017).

In the health sciences, smartphones have become a widely used source of information. The accelerometer is often used to measure and recognize physical and biological activity; this data is combined with data from the gyroscope and the magnetometer to get an even more accurate estimate of one’s physical activities. Heart rate monitoring, fall detection of the elderly and measuring sedentary time are just a few examples of other measurements now gathered by smartphones. There are now also experiments with obese volunteers taking pictures of their meals. Computer-aided food identification and quantity estimation logarithms make it possible to feed back information to them about their caloric intake and help them adapt healthier eating patterns.

And lastly, smartphones can generate data for “smart cities.” By tracking and understanding individuals’ mobility using GPS, optimal routes can be calculated, traffic can be better forecasted, abnormal events can be detected and logistical pathways improved. Of course, there are also immediate benefits. Having difficulty finding a parking spot? Just hook up your smartphone and easily locate people that look like they are about to leave their parking spot nearby.

All these examples show that smartphones are rapidly getting a central spot in the evolution of social networks, green applications, global environmental monitoring, personal and community healthcare, sensor augmented gaming, virtual reality and smart transportation systems.

At Elsevier, we are proud to present a selection of smartphone based articles for citizen science. We have made these articles freely available until May 31, 2017. See our virtual special issue below.

Using a smartphone for science: a virtual special issue

Environment

Health

Space

Smart cities and society

Technical