Abstract
In the past few years, significant development has been achieved in wireless sensor networks, thus enabling continuous monitoring facilities in different sectors. With these advancements, coupled with the extraordinary development of mobile devices with astonishing computing capacity, mobile sensing has become one of the emerging aspects of wireless sensor network. Being equipped with multiple sensors, smartphones have emerged as the central personal sensing device. In recent times, significant advancements have been made in the field of mobile sensing. Smartphones are equipped with plethora of sensors and they have become the central gadget for most people, enabling various mobile sensing applications. These sensors can collect important context information regarding users, devices, networks, changes in environment, and so on. Mobile crowd sensing enables everyone to contribute data from their mobile devices. The combined power of wireless sensor networks and emerging mobile sensing can provide immense and novel applications and systems into every sector of our economy.
Diverse applications like social networks, healthcare, environmental monitoring, transportation safety, and social business can be vastly benefitted through the contributions of mobile sensing. Along with the advancements in mobile sensing, challenges are also appearing in large numbers. Energy drainage caused by continuous operation of on-board sensors, environmental pollution due to excessive emission of CO2 from devices, security, privacy, trust, and so on are emerging as major challenges in achieving full performance benefits from the sensors.
This Special Issue provides the opportunity for researchers to review and discuss the state-of-the-art and various trends of mobile sensing techniques and applications and also propose new solutions. From the vast number of submissions, we have finally chosen two papers, both having novel and different approaches to provide unique methods.
The first paper “A Mobile Sensing Method to Counteract Social Media Websites Impersonation” by Mohamed Y ELMassry et al. focuses on developing a new algorithm to overcome phishing attacks. An efficient phishing website detection algorithm using three-step checking is provided. A novel method is proposed based on human behavior analysis. It tries to simulate the user’s memory ability to help in strengthening the credential of the website in an implicit way to the user, thus identifying a phishing website. Experiments comparing the proposed method with the state-of-the-art approaches illustrate new kinds of phishing warnings with better outcomes and less false positives.
The second paper “Biomechanically influenced mobile and participatory pedestrian data for bridge monitoring” by Ekin Ozer et al. emphasizes on using pedestrians’ smartphone data to conduct force estimation and modal identification for structural health-monitoring purposes. They have adopted two major pedestrian activities, walking and standing, in order to estimate walk-induced forces on structures and identify modal parameters, respectively. This novel approach presents the first structural health-monitoring application recruiting pedestrians in a testbed bridge monitoring scenario.
Being a relatively new sector, there are still many challenges to be addressed in the domain of mobile sensing. Hopefully, the abovementioned approaches will provide basis for new and improved methodologies thus enabling significant advancements in this sector.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
In concluding this guest editorial, the author would like to thank everyone involved in the overall processing of this Special Issue. Also, the author would like to thank all the authors for submitting their papers containing quality works. The author is grateful to the reviewers for their professional and timely work in making it possible to publish this Special Issue.