Mobile devices are much more than just a phone. Leaving the voice centric services behind, mobile devices help us to "sense" the real world. Commercial mobile phones have already inbuilt sensors such a microphone, camera, or additional ones as in the Nokia 5500 for movement detection.  But this can be seen only as the first step. First of all, not all kinds of sensor can be build into the mobile phones due to cost and energy reasons. Furthermore, sensors need to  observe  a given place or object  while the mobile phone stays with its customers.  This brings us to external sensors for mobile phone.

Aalborg University and Technical University of Berlin have started to  design the openSensor.  The idea is to offer a programmable sensor platform to researcher around the world. The sensor itself  hosts a programmable DSP,  Bluetooth connectivity, a second ISM band communication, mini USB connection etc.  Real sensoric capability such as (temperature, distance, etc) can  be added to the plattform.  The sensors can communicate among each other using the ISM band communication. Bluetooth is onboard to connect to the mobile phones (We have also sensors without Bluetooth. To convey information to the mobile phones, they would relay their information via sensors with Bluetooth connectivity).

Some projects using those sensors have already been realized such as the park sensor.

We would be highly interested whether some of you would be interested to start their own project with this external sensors. So far we  produce all sensors manually, but in the future mass production is the goal and we would give the sensors away for  the actual costs.

Here a foto of the sensor. We have two stackable layer. One for the DSP and the  developer connectivity and the second layer for wireless communication.