2 HotMobile papers that grabbed us: WalkSafe and SpinLoc

WalkSafe keeps pedestrians from walking into cars; SpinLoc lets you twirl to figure out where you are

The recent HotMobile conference in San Diego attracted dozens of top mobile technology researchers who presented papers on their latest findings. While we didn’t attend the event, a couple of papers jumped out at us while browsing the agenda.

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Researchers from Dartmouth University’s Mobile Sensing Group and the University of Bologna presented a paper titled “WalkSafe: A Pedestrian Safety App for Mobile Phone Users Who Walk and Talk While Crossing Roads.” Their research resulted in a free app called WalkSafe that’s been on the Android Market since last year and that “operates at the intersection of vision, learning and mobile computing.”

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The app exploits a mobile phone’s back camera to detect approaching vehicles and alert the user, via vibration or sound, of the impending danger. It also uses the phone’s accelerometer sensors. The researchers used machine learning algorithms to allow the phone to detect vehicles during active calls. Studies of the app have shown it delivers few false positives, though doesn’t identify all oncoming vehicles.

The researchers acknowledge that other apps exist that allow users to text or email and walk by showing the road ahead as a background image, but cite findings that even with such an app phone users are probably too distracted to attend to their own safety. Other apps have been developed to initiate communications between cars and pedestrians, but the researchers say broad implementation would be very involved and “perhaps, unlikely.”

Future research includes improving vehicle detection to include bicycles, motor bikes and more, as well as improving detection of vehicles at night, since that’s when so many pedestrian accidents occur. Barbara Wang, one of the Dartmouth researchers who is now at Google, says there are no plans to extend the app beyond Android anytime soon.
A fresh spin on wireless localization

Another research paper that caught our eyes was “SpinLoc: Spin Once to Know Your Location,” from researchers at Duke University and the University of South Carolina. The researchers say that while location-based apps have exploded of late, most don’t involve indoor localization, which could be used, for example, to orient yourself in a shopping mall or big engineering building on a college campus.

Souvik Sen from Duke describes the research as being about indoor localization using existing Wi-Fi deployments. “The technique requires no painful war driving, but requires the user to spin around once to find her location. As the user spins, we find that her body blocks the incoming WiFi signal. The dip in signal strength is the highest when her body is exactly between the access point and her phone. Thus by finding the minimum signal strength and using the corresponding phone compass value, it is possible to find the direction of the AP from her phone. If we can hear multiple APs (a very general setting), we can triangulate with these directions, and find the user’s location. Preliminary work shows a localization accuracy of 5 meters, and we are hoping to reduce that in our future work.”

Who knows, maybe WalkSafe and SpinLoc will need to be combined some day to keep people from twirling into oncoming shopping carts.
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Review: Android-based Wi-Fi stumblers

Four easy-to-use wireless management and security tools that cost under $2

Wi-Fi stumblers are handy when checking for channel usage, signal strength, security status, and detecting rogue access points, in situations where enterprise-level tools aren’t necessary. We recently reviewed stumblers for your PC or laptop. Here’s a look at a few Wi-Fi stumblers for your Android smartphone or tablet, which makes it even more convenient for quick and simple wireless checks. Read a story version of this.

Meraki WiFi Stumbler (Free)
This is one of the most basic Wi-Fi stumblers, but can still be useful for simple channel and signal checks for access points in the 2.4GHz band. Once you open it, you’ll find a small bar graph showing how many access points are detected per channel (1 – 11 only), which can quickly help you identify possible channel overlapping. It also displays in numerical values how many SSIDs and access points are detected. You’ll also find a SSID list, displaying the channel(s), signal (RSSI in dB), security type, and any detected access point vendor.

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Meraki WiFi Stumbler
On the bottom of the app you’ll find a convenient Email Results button. Tap it and it will automatically summarize the scan results in the body of a message and also attach a CSV document, which includes the relevant details and the GPS coordinates as well.

Wifi Analyzer (Free)
This is a more advanced Wi-Fi stumbler, giving you multiple ways to view the access point details. In addition to the common 2.4-GHz band, it also supports the 5-GHz band on supported devices. Though by default it’s AD-supported, you can actually hide the ADs for a week at a time via the Settings.

Though by default it only shows WPA or WPA2, you can make it show full security methods via the Settings. Then you can distinguish between the PSK and EAP modes of WPA/WPA2 and the TKIP and CCMP encryption types. If you’re connected to an access point, you’ll also see the details (SSID, MAC, and IP) on top of the AP list screen.

The time graph screen shows a line graph displaying the access point signals over time in negative dBm values, which you can also filter to show only selected access points. The channel rating screen gives you recommendations on channel usage, basically showing which ones have the least signals. The signal meter screen can help you find a selected access point with a visual signal meter and sound effect.

Wifi Tracker ($1.56)
Designed for larger wireless surveys, audits, or war drives, this stumbler logs the Wi-Fi details and GPS location info for you to export a variety of ways. It can produce and send a KML file for Google Earth viewing, CVS file for Kismet or spreadsheet viewing, and can even upload real-time to WiGLE.net or your own web server.

WLANController WiFi Scanner ($0.99)
This Wi-Fi stumbler is designed for larger wireless surveys, audits, war drives, and basic rogue AP detection of the 2.4 GHz and (on supported devices) 5 GHz bands. The app serves as a sensor/client for a cloud-based distributed Wi-Fi scanning solution, so no results are shown on the device itself. You must sign up for their free or paid service to view the scan results online.