IBM Offers Smartphone Data Services for Green Trip to China

There is a need — and a challenge — for companies to become “greener”. By integrating the knowledge of what is “green” into their business strategies, companies can become more sustainable, respond to society's environmental demands in an ethical and equitable manner, avert risk, improve their efficiency; increase customer focus, and become more competitive.

Recently, The VisLab Intercontinental Autonomous Challenge (VIAC), an epic 13,000km journey from Parma, Italy to Shanghai, China using unmanned, solar energy powered vehicles, aims to showcase the benefits of green transport.

Over the course of the trip, the automated vehicles will use IBM Human Centric solutions to collect data on CO2 pollutants in the regions covered along the way – Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Hungary, Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan and China – using the data to assess the health and environmental impact of CO2 in these areas.

During the course of the drive, IBM (News - Alert) Human Centric Solutions will illustrate the data collecting potential of Smartphones. VIAC vehicles will be equipped with specially-designed Smartphones that monitor CO2 levels, providing a live stream of data to the web via twitter, @greenhaviour, throughout the journey.  

Ed Jellard, consultant from IBM Hursley Development Lab said that visualising the data will enable us to identify quickly how pollution levels vary across continents. We will use IBM analytical tools to discover trends such as a correlation between certain illnesses and the quality of the air.

Nicola Palmarini, IBM Human Centric Solutions Centresaid also said that the strategy is to connect devices to the Internet and apply intelligence and services on top of that and in this way we empower million of citizens to communicate information through the devices they already own, helping decision makers to react in a quicker and smarter way. He added that the company can put computational power into objects that include cars, appliances, roadways, power grids, clothes or in natural systems, such as agriculture and waterways.

The technology used in this initiative is developed by IBM with the hardware support of SenSaris for the CO2 Bluetooth sensors. It is based on IBM Message Broker, WebSphere Application Server software and Tivoli Storage Manager and runs on the Android (News - Alert) 2.1 mobile platform.