What is Urban Computing

Nowadays smartphones are equipped with a large amount of sensors, including GPS, accelerometers, cameras, microphones, and light sensors. These sensors are the perfect way for sensing the context in which a user is located. This chapter describes a simple framework able to recognize different kind of events triggered by sensors, distributing them among interactive objects. This framework has been tested in an application able to recognize the movement of a user in indoor and outer locations, and in another one able to detect a user’s falls and car accidents analyzing the information provided by the accelerometers of a smartphone. The proposed application is an example of the framework utilization based on the combination of the existing sensors in a common smartphones. This method tries to minimize the typical error localization inaccuracy of current systems. One of the main motivations of this chapter is to demonstrate the possibility to successfully manage and add different kind of sensors to an application.