Influencing people to save the earth one Tweet at a time

Abstract

Historical measurements of CO2 at South Africa's Cape Point have shown a steady increase from 355.6 ppm (parts per million) in 1993 to 387 ppm in 2011. Climatologists and politicians often disagree over the interpretation of those facts arguing whether or not the increase of greenhouse gasses contribute to global warming or not. The public, in the meantime, often does not have access to the data in a form or via a channel which is easily understandable and accessible. This paper describes a project of timeously publishing hourly updates of the carbon levels at South Africa's Cape Point on Twitter and Facebook in a manner which is easy for the non-scientific public to interpret. This is an example of an Internet of Things application where physical devices take an active part on the Internet. As more and more physical objects are created with digital intelligence, the Internet of Things grows. This project demonstrates how physical devices can provide people with important information which may affect their health and well-being. The carbon related data is collected at Cape Point using Picarro monitoring equipment. The Picarro monitoring equipment makes multiple measurements per minute of various gases and stores them locally on the monitoring device. The carbon data is then forwarded hourly to the Beachcomber platform which is an Internet of Things platform designed to link things with people using standard Internet protocols. Beachcomber is a Java Enterprise Application running under Mobicents and supports a wide variety of protocols including HTTP, POP3 Email, XMPP, JMS, and a number of additional propriety protocols such as MXit. Beachcomber routes the incoming data to the appropriate Service Building Block which then processes the incoming data creating a number of graphs and visualisations of the data. A summary of the data, the graphs, and the visualisations are then forwarded to Twitter and Facebook in a timely manner for consumption by the general public. In the vision of the Internet of Things, this project is a stepping stone to future research in attempting to modify personal behaviour by providing timeous physical information. In the future, one can envision a smart city where, for example, the ticket prices for public transportation into the city centre are lowered automatically when the carbon levels are high thereby encouraging people to utilise the train or bus service. Alternatively, a future smart city could automatically increase the price of parking in the city centre when carbon levels are high thereby discouraging the use of private automobiles on such days. In addition, the smart city could then communicate with regular commuters encouraging them to telecommute on days when carbon levels are unacceptably high.