New Technology to Tell Carbon Footprint Using GPS Mobile and Enable Competition with Facebook Friends

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed or daily email newsletter.

Have you ever wondered which driving path you should take to minimize your environmental impact? Or do you know how much exposed you are to GHG emissions when you jog in the local park? A couple of eco-conscious researchers are now going to let you learn that by downloading software on your GPS mobile.

UCLA Professor Deborah Estrin is working with her colleagues on this CENS project, which will give you some sense of your environmental responsibility through its Personal Environmental Impact Report (PEIR). These daily reports will tell you how much pollution you cause while you drive and what quantity of harmful gases you inhale during your ‘healthy’ walks.

“It’s meant to be a tool to compare different patterns and habits in your own life, so you can say, ‘Well, doing this seems to expose me more,’ or ‘I have a greater impact from this commute compared with that commute’,” said Jeff Burke, who’s one of the four chief researchers on this project.

And here’s the fun part. To motivate you into cutting your carbon footprint, you get the option to add this data to your Facebook profile for others to see. In addition, it also allows you to compete with your friends and see who has the smallest impact.

Read this UCLA article for a brief introduction of how this works, or wait for it to appear at Wired Magazine’s NextFest 2008 next month. You can also see a demo version of PEIR using ‘demo’ as both username and password.