Jeff Burke, area lead for UCLA's Center for Embedded Network Sensing, said the social networking aspect helps put the results in a relevant context and allows participants to compete among themselves.
"In order for people to understand the numbers, it's not enough to see just kilograms of carbon," he said. "When they can compare themselves to friends and others on Facebook, they can make sense of what they're doing."
The UCLA center has been working with Nokia's Research Center in Palo Alto on the personal environmental impact report project, conducting a number of internal tests. The San Francisco trial is the first real-world test for the program.
Eventually, Burke said, the goal is to make the project software available as a download for any GPS-enabled phone, so individuals can monitor their own carbon impact.
John Shen, lab director for the Nokia Research Center, said the project touches on the power of the cell phone as a real-time sensor. Shen said for teens in particular, using a cell phone to bring home lessons about a sometimes abstract topic like the environment makes sense. And it proves more accurate and less burdensome than self-reporting, he said.
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