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Section: New Software and Platforms
ElectroSmart
Keywords: Crowd-sourcing - UMTS - GSM - Bluetooth - Wi-Fi - 4G - 3G - 2G - Electromagnetic waves - Android - LTE
Functional Description: The Internet and new devices such as smartphones have fundamentally changed the way people communicate, but this technological revolution comes at the price of a higher exposition of the general population to microwave electromagnetic fields (EMF). This exposition is a concern for health agencies and epidemiologists who want to understand the impact of such an exposition on health, for the general public who wants a higher transparency on its exposition and the health hazard it might represent, but also for cellular operators and regulation authorities who want to improve the cellular coverage while limiting the exposition, and for computer scientists who want to better understand the network connectivity in order to optimize communication protocols. Despite the fundamental importance to understand the exposition of the general public to EMF, it is poorly understood because of the formidable difficulty to measure, model, and analyze this exposition.
The goal of the ElectroSmart project is to develop the instrument, methods, and models to compute the exposition of the general public to microwave electromagnetic fields used by wireless protocols and infrastructures such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or cellular. Using a pluri-disciplinary approach combining crowd-based measurements, in-lab experiments, and modeling using sparse and noisy data, we address challenges such as designing and implementing a measuring instrument leveraging on crowd-based measurements from mobile devices such as smartphones, modeling the exposition of the general public to EMF to compute the most accurate estimation of the exposition, and analyzing the evolution of the exposition to EMF with time. This technological breakthrough will have scientific, technical, and societal applications, notably on public health politics, by providing the scientific community and potential users with a unique measuring instrument, methods, and models to exploit the invaluable data gathered by the instrument.
This project is supported by the UCN@Sophia Labex in 2016/2017/2018 (funding the engineer Mondi Ravi), by an Inria ADT (funding the engineer Abdelhakim Akodadi) 2017/2018, by and Inria ATT (funding the business developer David Migliacci) in 2017/2018, and by the academy 1 of UCAJedi (funding a Ph.D. student Yanis Boussad) 2017/2020.
In August 2016, we released the first stable public release of ElectroSmart. On the 22th December 2017 we have 35 836 downloads in Google Play, an average score of 4,6/5, 10 538 active users, 350 millions measured signals.
We are in a process of creating a startup to commercialize the exposition maps we can build with the data we are collecting.