Participatory Sensing Revolution

The other day I ran across this interesting clip about participatory sensing (below). The technology, being developed by Nokia and UCLA, allows individuals and communities to understand their individual and community environmental impact and it also allows them to understand more about the sources of pollution in their community.

The clip's overblown and CSI:Miami feel understates the real potential of the concept, which, in my opinion, is much more subtle: that existing technologies can quickly be coupled with environmental information to give people a better understanding about their choices. In the simplest form, monthly bank statements could include social and environmental impacts of your purchases. In the same way that finding out that 50 % of your monthly spending went to restaurants makes you think more critically about your eating habits, the realization that your purchases created 700 lbs of packaging trash would make you think twice about the packaging of your next purchase. Similarly, cell phones could display the social and environmental information of products that you can't find on the price tag. This would let you make more informed purchases.

The way that I see it, the sky is the limit.