Crowdsourcing Physiological Conditions and Subjective Emotions by Coupling Technical and Human Mobile Sensors

In contrast to previous approaches, Urban Emotions defines Smart Cities not only as technology-enriched cities, but also emphasises the human factor – Smart Citizens. This is due to the fact that the question of how people perceive a city and how they feel about it has always been important in urban planning and management. In this paper we present our approach for crowdsourcing physiological conditions and subjective emotions by combining data from technical sensors (measuring psycho-physiological parameters) and human sensors (“People as Sensors” contributing subjectively perceived emotions). Furthermore, we couple this crowdsourcing approach with a technical architecture to harmonise and integrate the sensor data via standardised service interfaces (Sensor Web Enablement – SWE) to allow for generic access for further analysis and visualisation. Finally, we discuss the use of emotion information in urban planning and point out related privacy issues together with a number of strategies to mitigate those.