Sense Umbrella Connection and Desensitisation

Weather Witness

Bachelor thesis (2017)

Authors

R.A. van Driel Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science
J.R.T.E. van der Hout Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science
M.M. van der Wel Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Contributors

C.C.S. Liem (supervisor 1)
Faculty
Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science
Copyright: © 2017 Ronald van Driel, Justin van der Hout, Marissa van der Wel, Marco Houtman
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Published Date

09-07-2017

Language

English

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Faculty

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Abstract

As of this moment there is a lack of data about rainfall in cities. To collect such data, IBM has started the Sense Umbrella Connection and Desensitisation project. For this project an umbrella was equipped with a piezoelectric sensor and a Bluetooth device to record the rain that falls on the surface of this umbrella. One downside of this umbrella is that, besides rain, it will also record other sounds which include recognisable human speech. Because IBM values privacy, one of the tasks was to make sure that no recording containing recognisable human speech would be uploaded to a server.

This bachelor project focuses on creating a mobile application to connect to the umbrella via Bluetooth and save the audio recordings of rain together with GPS data. After saving this data it would originally be analysed for presence of rain and it was also required to remove all human speech before it was sent from the phone to the server. Over the course of the project it became clear that because of a scarce set of sample data and the limited availability of audio processing libraries on Android, it would be difficult to process audio on Android devices. This is why the decision was made to upload all data, and the processing and analysing was moved to an external device supporting Java.
The raw data will now be uploaded to a server which will make a database entry which includes GPS data, and saves the audio file. In the end an app has been developed that is able to gather data from the umbrella and send it to an external server. Additionally an implementation has been made to analyse the audio data gathered to classify which parts may contain rain.

This project focused on developing an Android app and not on other operating systems due to time constraints.