Abstract
Participatory sensing (PS), an emerging sensing paradigm through organizing people and their mobile devices as sensors, is regarded as a promising solution to solve large-scale urban issues. PS has been implemented in many applications such as transportation, environmental monitoring, public health, etc. These applications are of high relevance for smart cities. Smart cities rely on the infrastructures established by government and industrial agencies to sense urban dynamics. PS can complement these infrastructures by involving "human sensors" and obtaining insights into people's activities. In this paper, the key features and challenges of PS are surveyed. A prototype PS platform is designed for efficient collection and management of smartphone sensing and survey data. A transport trip quality measurement system (TQMS) has been developed using this platform. Our experience to organize PS activities through a novel collaboration driven incentive mechanism is elucidated. A comprehensive real-world PS case study on TQMS including platform promotion, project collaboration, participant recruitment, activity organization has been successfully completed. This paper is concluded by discussing the potential future applications of the PS platform.