Smartphone DAQ

Statistics in 2008 showed that there are about 3.2 billion mobile subscribers in the world, and that number is expected to grow by at least a billion in the next few years. It makes the device more ubiquitous than the car or PC. Of this number, Market research group Strategy Analytics said that global smartphone shipments hit 34 million units worldwide in Q2 2008, representing 12 percent of total volumes. Going forward, new figures from research firm Telsyte suggest 30% of all phones sold will be smartphones in the near future. The operating systems of these smartphones comprise Android, Blackberry, Microsoft, Apple, Palm, Symbian. The largest market share of the smartphone operating systems in 2008 is held by Symbian which has over 50% market share.



The EMANT380, a US$159 Bluetooth DAQ, allows the users to quickly build a proof of concept, smartphone DAQ system using either the Windows Mobile and Symbian S60 operating systems using the bluetooth SPP and socket services available on these smartphones. By building on the existing app notes for the EMANT300 USB DAQ (like measuring heart rate, blood pressure, weight, temperature, respiration, ECG etc), students and hobbyists have examples that they can USE, COPY and MODIFY to their new solutions.

Using the theme Smartphone for Measurement and Automation, some application areas that can be considered include

1. elderly monitoring (silver hair program)
2. energy conservation instrumentation
3. gaming human interfaces

In Singapore, to inspire student interests in Engineering and Technology and to demonstrate that Engineering is essential to developing products and services that improve our daily lives, SIAA (Singapore Industrial Automation Association) together SPRING-IE Singapore has initiated an Outreach Program to encourage student projects around the smartphone DAQ. The smartphone DAQ acts as a low cost and quick prototyping platform to demonstrate novel and even wacky M2M (machine to machine) applications.

Singapore Polytechnic is the first recipient of 30 starter EMANT380 Bluetooth DAQ kits which will be used in Singapore Polytechnic's CDIO™ Initiative. The CDIO™ Initiative stresses product and systems development and deployment with Conceiving, Designing, Implementing, Operating as the model and context for acquiring technical concepts.

In the US, Dean Kamen teamed up with Forum Nokia in September 2008 to encourage young mobile developers to create applications to benefit society. The contest Calling All Innovators will award up to $150,000 dollars to the winner. The application must be designed for emerging societies where resources are scarce. One example is an application from India that allows farmers to control their water pumps with handheld devices. He says "Now that mobile devices are becoming as powerful as personal computers and more ubiquitous, challenging mobile developers and young inventors to develop the right applications can take the device simply known as a cellular phone and transform it into a catalyst to help society in many different ways."

Symbian's David Wood wrote in his article Smartphone programming goes mainstream that Python is poised to potentially play a significant role for smartphones programming. Quoting Jürgen Scheible, the seminar leader of a week-long course held at the University of Art and Design, Helsinki, the reasons for choosing Python include:

• It is easy to learn
• Students don’t need to master any advanced computing concepts
• It can be used to create working applications in a short space of time
• A multitude of ideas can be tested and the best ones kept
• The motivation for pursuing an idea is high because results can be achieved quickly and an iterative development cycle easily applied.
• It provides easy access to smartphone features such as the camera, Bluetooth, text messages, graphics drawing, and networking

EPROM, part of MIT's Program for Developmental Entrepreneurship, aims to foster mobile phone-related research and entrepreneurship. It has now expanded to 10 countries within Sub Saharan Africa including Kenya, Rwanda, Ethiopia, and Uganda. Key activities include:

• the development of new applications for mobile phone users worldwide
• academic research using mobile phones
• the creation of a widely applicable mobile phone programming curriculum

Kai Oistamo, Nokia's executive vice president, who delivered The Smartphone Show 2008 keynote speech changed the title of his speech from "The Future of Smartphones" to "The Future of Computing." He said "It's time to recognize that today's smart phones are full-fledged computers. We should call them what they really are."

In Dec 2008 Nokia Research Center (NRC) released a paper entitled Sensing the World with Mobile Devices The Vision that talks about the fact that as mobile device subscriptions pass the four billion mark, we’re looking at the smartphone as the world’s most distributed and pervasive sensing instrument. Thanks to an increasing number of built-in sensors — ambient light, orientation, acoustical, video, velocity, GPS — each device can capture, classify, and transmit many types of data with exceptional granularity. The perfect platform for sensing the world is already in our hands. Add to the smartphone an external DAQ module and more sensors types can now be used.

At the Mobile Learning 09 conference in Feb 2009, CTIA tries to show the educational value of smartphones by demonstrating that smartphones in education can make students smarter. Basically it is making the same pitch that the computer industry has been profitably making to educators since the 1980s. The only difference now between smartphones and laptops is that cellphones are smaller, cheaper and more coveted by students.

This site recognises that most applications require collaboration between users coming from different disciplines. The Projects page allows the specifier or user of the solution to contact and work with the developers who come from different disciplines and/or even different continents.

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