Introducing a flexible rewarding platform for mobile crowd-sensing applications

Abstract

Over the course of the last years, a growing number of Mobile Crowd-Sensing (MCS) applications have been developed to exploit the broad availability of sensor-equipped mobile devices for large scale monitoring and data gathering tasks. MCS systems often pursue goals oriented towards the common good, intrinsically generating social value through the participation of volunteers to a shared cause. They benefit from the participation of large numbers of people and thus often rely on a variety of incentive mechanisms (either intrinsic or extrinsic) to motivate users. External stakeholders may also be interested in contributing to the common cause without actively taking part in the crowd-sensing process. This work introduces an inclusive rewarding platform for MCS applications that put different crowd-sensing systems, volunteers, and third-party stakeholders in communication in order to trigger network effects and positive externalities that can contribute to the common good. A simple general purpose rewarding protocol, based on the exchange of anonymous vouchers, is proposed and discussed.