Lancaster University Explores Innovative Ways of Using Location Data

Mobile application developers at the U.K. Lancaster University are no strangers to collecting accolades, having won numerous awards over the years. This year alone the team has won a Nokia WidSets widget-coding competition, the Vodafone and Forum Nokia WidSets Challenge 2008, and The Most Innovative NFC Research Project of the Year 2008 award at the 2nd European NIFCO Business & Technical Developers Summit in Monaco.

In May, the team added a Forum Nokia Achievement Award for Innovation in Web 2.0 and NFC. The award was presented at the Forum Nokia Innovation Seminar in Barcelona, Spain for Paul Coulton, Reuben Edwards and Will Bamford.

In just two months, two of the team's game widgets gained nearly 600,000 users, illustrating the widespread interest in the group's recent work in Widgets widgets.

Commenting on the award, Paul Coulton of Lancaster University said: "It's really nice to get this recognition, especially because it comes from industry, which often sees the work of academia as being a little abstract and blue-sky. And it's really good feedback for the students at the university who worked on the project. They can see that their qualifications and work are relevant to industry."

The mobile researchers at Lancaster University, operating under the "Mobile Radicals" banner, have a wide range of interests. Those interests span novel mobile-entertainment and commerce systems, mobile game research, Web 2.0, and location-based services (LBS). Some of the team's best-known applications in the past few years are in the location category, which was a hot topic at the Forum Nokia Innovation Seminar.

Innovation from social interaction

Take LocoMash, for example. The application enables people attending an event to take pictures using their smartphones, link them with GPS location information, and upload them to a Web site that overlays them on a map. Users can then view the event on the map, zooming in and out and clicking on pictures to see photos of what happened anywhere at the site. LocoMash has been widely used at various events, including the Roskilde Festival 2007 in Denmark, and gives a fascinating perspective that is based on location rather than on conventional, time-based records.

Another recent application from Mobile Radicals, called Exertion Maps, combines location information with biometrics to track a mobile phone user’s heart rate on a map. The application combines GPS and map information with a heart-rate monitor to enable the user to track heart rate over time on a map that shows the route the user has taken. The aim is to provide users with a convenient way of monitoring exercise and seeing how their heart rates change as they run or walk.

Such applications illustrate the power of mashups of information, from location to imaging to sensors, to break new ground and enable users to interact socially in new ways.

A final thought from Coulton, in a reference to a quote from mobile-technology commentator Howard Rheingold, is that "the killer application of tomorrow won't come from hardware or software, but will lie in social practices. Technology plays only a part. Remember that every mobile has a user connected to it."

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