Drivers as sensors: an undergraduate thesis proposes a crowdsourced app to monitor city fleets
Jonathan Paiva and Luis Henrique Guimarães defended at FCTE/UnB an undergraduate thesis replacing sensors and cameras with human collaboration to monitor cars across a city — the NotifiCar app.
Brasília, July 6, 2018
Monitoring the status of cars in a city — parked illegally, involved in accidents, mechanically stalled — usually requires expensive instrumentation: digital sensors, cameras, image processing. Jonathan Nogueira Rufino Batista Paiva and Luis Henrique Nunes Guimarães proposed a different path in the undergraduate thesis defended in July 2018 at FCTE/UnB, under the advising of Prof. André Luiz Peron Martins Lanna : the driver herself, armed with an app, becomes the sensor.
The NotifiCar project is a cross-platform mobile application designed to receive, via collaborative notification, what digital sensors would provide at much higher cost. The authors face typical challenges of applications of this kind — cross-platform sync, identity management, validation mechanisms — but the conceptual merit lies in the inversion: instead of instrumenting the city, instrument those who already inhabit it, with incentives to report in real time.
The work touches software architecture and urban digital transformation , betting on low-friction solutions that depend more on social engagement than on heavy infrastructure.
The full text — written in Portuguese — is available at the UnB Undergraduate Theses Digital Library.
About CEDIS: The Center for Studies, Development, and Innovation in Software (CEDIS), linked to the University of Brasília, researches and develops innovative software solutions.