FoneAstra: Making Mobile Phones Smarter
GOAL: Cost-effective and energy-efficient methods to enhance
sensing capabilities of Commodity Mobile Phones
Motivation
Our Solution - FoneAstra
• Mobile phones are the de-facto computing platform in developing
countries
• Commonly used Low-tier phones are resource constrained
• Minimal hardware to support basic telephony
• Do not have a programmable runtime environment
• Limited service delivery to users (SMS &Voice only)
• Extend phone capabilities via a low-cost,
programmable hardware plug-in
• FoneAstra for application-specific computation
• Leverage phone for communications and IO
• Host additional application-specific sensors
Applications
• Cell tower-ID based location tracking
• Vaccine Cold Chain Monitoring
• Milk Pasteurization in Human Milk Banks
Future Work
• In-field deployments with partner NGOs
• Support for audio-based IO
• Interface to Smart Phones
• USB-powered sensors
• Applications in healthcare–delivery, point-ofcare-diagnostics
• SmartFoneAstra for MDPhone
Acknowledgements
Microsoft Research India, Bangalore
and especially Kentaro Toyama for
funding initial platform development.
Rohit Chaudhri, Gaetano Borriello
DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE & ENGINEERING
UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON
[email protected]